The richest 1% own nearly a third of the country’s wealth. Between early 2025 and early 2026, their wealth grew by more than the bottom half of the country owns altogether. Corporate profits hit a record this year, the share of national income going to profits is the highest since the 1940s, and workers are receiving the smallest share of what they produce since records began.
The concentration of wealth brings a concentration of political power with it. As ownership concentrates in fewer hands, enormous economic power is concentrated there too. The capitalist class that owns the means of production, the banks and the great financial fortunes has always dominated the government that protects that ownership. What is new is that the domination itself is concentrating — in fewer hands, and in fewer parts of the government.
That concentration is growing at the same time that capitalist crisis and imperialist war put greater pressure on the ordinary machinery of capitalist government. More power is moving into the presidency, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, police and other parts of the government apparatus that can act with less interference from below.
The crisis is visible in the reserves of the capitalist governments themselves. Central banks have been buying gold since 2022 on a scale not seen in decades, and by the end of 2025 the gold they held was worth more than the U.S. government bonds they held. The Netherlands moved a large part of its gold out of New York this year. France emptied out what it had left there.
Gold sold for about $1,300 an ounce 10 years ago and passed $4,000 in November 2025. Read the other way around, each dollar now represents less gold. That is inflation.
The war compounds it. Washington is borrowing heavily to pay for the war on Iran, and U.S. government debt has passed $40 trillion. It has to sell that debt to the same governments and institutions that are moving their reserves out of dollars and into gold. The less willing they are to hold it, the higher the interest they demand.
Rule at a distance, and rule up close
Owning the country and governing it are not usually the same job. Presidents, members of Congress, cabinet officials and the permanent apparatus that administers the capitalist state do the governing. The capitalist class keeps the ownership.
They rule this way because it works better than ruling in their own name. Elections are the cover. The government looks like it answers to the people who vote, not to the people who own.
But that distance can narrow sharply in a period of crisis.
Marxist writer Sam Marcy described both the Kennedy assassination and the forcing out of Nixon as coups d’état — extra-electoral transfers of governing power inside the ruling class.
Kennedy was murdered in 1963 after alienating the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, the anti-Castro forces and the Southern racist establishment over Cuba and civil rights. Writing in 1991, Marcy held that the killing was part of a coup that put Lyndon Johnson in the White House and that the Warren Commission existed to cover it up. Nixon was removed politically rather than physically. He had built a domestic surveillance operation outside and against the FBI and the CIA, and when Watergate broke, the press, the courts, Congress and the military establishment were not behind him. He resigned in August 1974 rather than face removal.
Vice President Spiro Agnew had already resigned in 1973 over bribery. By the time Nixon went, neither the president nor the vice president had been elected to the office. Gerald Ford, appointed to replace Agnew, moved up and appointed Nelson Rockefeller — heir to one of the country’s greatest capitalist fortunes — to the vacancy behind him. A representative of one of the dominant capitalist families had moved directly into the executive branch.
Trump was already a billionaire when he first took office in 2017, and his fortune fell during that term. His money was made in New York real estate, hotels and casinos, and in New York and Atlantic City his business dealings repeatedly tied him to organized crime.
He tried to hold the office by force when he lost it. The assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was an attempt to stop the certification of the vote and keep governing power outside the electoral process. It failed. Four years later the money did the work instead, and the machinery delivered what force could not.
His fortune has roughly doubled since he returned to the White House in January 2025, on cryptocurrency and his media company rather than real estate. Reuters estimates that four Trump-family crypto ventures produced $2.3 billion for the family from mid-2024 through April 2026. In 2025, buyers of his meme coin spent an estimated $148 million competing for admission to a dinner with the president at his private golf club, with the largest buyers receiving additional access.
A capitalist with vast private financial interests occupies the presidency and uses the office to make money for his family’s businesses.
He has surrounded himself with billionaires. Their companies are tied increasingly closely to government contracts, AI infrastructure and the expanding military apparatus.
Elon Musk spent nearly $300 million on the 2024 election, backing Trump and other Republican candidates. The world’s richest capitalist then took an appointment as a special government employee and ran the DOGE drive, which pushed some 260,000 federal workers out through layoffs, buyouts and early retirement.
Federal workers and their unions fought it. Protests spread across the country, and Republican members of Congress were confronted over the cuts at their own town halls. The courts found the firings illegal and ordered thousands of workers back. A year later most of the country still opposed what had been done.
One of the largest private fortunes in history had bought its way into the government it helped elect.
Musk was the most spectacular example, but he was not alone. A section of the new fortunes built in high tech, venture capital, cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence moved behind Trump during the campaign. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, David Sacks and other Silicon Valley billionaires and investors backed him. Trump brought Sacks into the White House as his adviser on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
Other billionaires took government posts. Howard Lutnick, who ran the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, became commerce secretary — and as co-chair of the transition helped fill the rest of the cabinet with people like himself. Linda McMahon of World Wrestling Entertainment took the Education Department, Doug Burgum Interior, Scott Bessent Treasury, Kelly Loeffler the Small Business Administration. The Washington Post counted 12 billionaires in the administration.
Still others moved rapidly toward Trump after the election. Musk, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos were given prominent places at Trump’s inauguration. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman each put $1 million into the inaugural fund.
The issue is no longer simply that great wealth buys access to government. At the highest levels, concentrated capital and the governing apparatus are increasingly interlocked.
That is a sign of instability, not of strength. Ruling at a distance works better for them. They rule in their own name when the concentration of wealth itself becomes unstable and the government resting on it starts to shake. Ford reached for a Rockefeller when the presidency itself was in crisis. A dozen billionaires in the cabinet is the same signal on a far larger scale.
The world the fortunes are taken from
U.S. capital dominates production, land, minerals and labor across much of the world, and Washington has spent a century defending that ownership by force. It has overthrown the governments that moved against it. The blockade of Cuba is in its seventh decade. Washington kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Primera Combatiente Cilia Flores on Jan. 3, 2026, installed Maduro’s vice president as acting president and took control of the country’s oil exports. It armed and directed the war on Gaza. It opened the war on Iran on Feb. 28, 2026.
Wars, blockades, coups and the stripping of whole economies drive people out of their countries. Many of them come here, to the country whose government did it.
The working class in the United States is made in large part of people from the countries Washington bombs, blockades and starves. They know what U.S. imperialism is because they have lived under it. They bring that knowledge into workplaces, unions, schools and neighborhoods, and it broadens what the whole class understands about its own government.
Trump’s answer is mass deportation, criminalizing the victims of imperialist oppression. Masked federal agents seize workers at construction sites and in parking lots. Thousands of agents were sent into Minneapolis in Operation Metro Surge. A 5-year-old, Liam Conejo Ramos, was taken with his father coming home from preschool in January 2026. Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed during immigration operations in Minneapolis in January, two among many. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the most in more than 20 years.
Tens of thousands marched in Minneapolis on Jan. 23, 2026. A national day of action a week later closed schools and businesses across several states, and demonstrations have continued in Portland, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.
Trump is attacking the section of the working class that knows from experience what the U.S. government does abroad — and knows it alongside everyone it works with here.
He does it through the arm of the government furthest from any vote.
Where the power is moving
Which billionaire holds which government post is the surface of it.
Congress appropriates money and confirms nominees. Elections are held. It takes a fortune or the backing of one to run for office, and the apparatus is built to keep people watching rather than acting. This is not democracy. But pressure from below can still register there, however indirectly and however little.
Power is moving into the presidency, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the police, which can act with less interference from below.
Musk did not need a single vote to push 260,000 federal workers out of their jobs. He held an appointment as a special government employee and the backing of the president.
The Trump administration has driven the AI buildout forward by executive action — speeding permits for giant data centers and the power plants and transmission lines they require, offering federal loans, grants and tax incentives, and opening federal land to AI infrastructure. Trump’s AI plan calls for new high-security data centers for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
Electricity bills have climbed across the country as utilities build the generating plants, high-voltage lines and substations the data centers demand, then spread the cost across everyone else’s bill. Rates have risen fastest in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest region where the data centers are most heavily concentrated. Households in northern Virginia, closest to the largest concentration of data centers in the world, have watched monthly bills double and triple.
In South Memphis, Musk’s xAI ran dozens of methane gas turbines without permits, public notice or pollution controls to power its Colossus supercomputers. They pump smog-forming pollution and formaldehyde into Boxtown, a Black neighborhood already ringed by a steel mill, an oil refinery and a gas plant, where the cancer risk runs four times the national average. Memphis already fails federal smog standards. The NAACP took the company to federal court.
Communities have fought back town by town. Dozens of counties and municipalities have imposed moratoriums on new data center construction — more than half the counties in Maryland. Texas municipalities have taken up at least 100 local ordinances since July 2025. New York imposed the first statewide moratorium on large data center permits in July 2026.
The fight crosses the lines the two capitalist parties use to divide working people. Democratic and Republican governors moved against the buildout in the same months this year. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only about one in seven people would welcome a data center in their own community, and only a third support the pace at which they are being built.
The opposition has to fight county by county and town by town. The buildout is driven from the executive branch.
Military spending is being pushed toward levels not seen since World War II. The war on Iran, launched Feb. 28, 2026, has lasted far longer than the White House said it would, and deployments have been extended into 2027. Militarism is what monopoly capitalism in decline requires, not a misallocation a different administration could reverse.
On Sept. 30, 2025, hundreds of generals and admirals commanding U.S. forces around the world were ordered to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia to hear the president speak of an “enemy from within” and tell them that U.S. cities could serve as “training grounds” for the armed forces. Trump has been purging the senior military command ever since.
In July 2026 Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a report naming at least 43 people and organizations on the U.S. left — mayors, members of Congress, a union and its founder, journalists — as instruments of the Cuban government. Days later a House committee subpoenaed three of the organizations on it, demanding their membership records, internal communications and finances.
The warnings from the top
Joe Biden described part of this on his way out of office. In his farewell address from the Oval Office on Jan. 15, 2025, he warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence.” He compared his warning to the one Dwight Eisenhower delivered in his own farewell address in January 1961, about the military-industrial complex, and said he was equally concerned about the rise of what he called a “tech-industrial complex.”
Eisenhower built it. The arms industry he warned about in his last days in office reached permanent size during his eight years in the White House, along with the nuclear arsenal and the CIA operations that overthrew the elected governments of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 and Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Mosaddegh had nationalized Iran’s oil. Árbenz had moved against the vast landholdings of the United Fruit Company. Washington overthrew both for taking property from capital.
Biden’s warning has the same character. The concentration he described as taking shape had been taking shape through his entire career in Washington. He served in the Senate through the decades when the postwar gains of the working class were broken and the fortunes at the top were rebuilt. As president, he armed and funded the war on Gaza, raised the military budget every year, and opened the federal drive to build out AI that Trump has since accelerated.
Eisenhower and Biden both warned about an apparatus they had spent their careers building.
What the 1930s won
Not since 1929, on the eve of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, has so much of the country’s wealth sat in the hands of the richest 0.1%.
Unemployed councils, sit-down strikes and the Congress of Industrial Organizations won the organized power to force concessions out of the capitalists. The CIO organized whole industries instead of separate crafts, and it brought Black, Latine and other oppressed workers into the unions in numbers the labor movement here had never seen before.
The Second World War left U.S. capitalism dominant over the world market, and that lifted the level of prosperity in the United States. Wages rose. Working-class families bought houses, won pensions and health coverage, put money in the bank.
Black and Latine workers were shut out of much of it — redlined out of the new housing and kept out of the jobs that carried pensions.
The ownership of the means of production remained with the capitalist class. The wages, the pensions and the health coverage could all be taken back.
And they were. Plants closed, taking with them the industrial jobs Black workers had fought their way into. Pensions gave way to savings plans workers paid into themselves. Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and barred them from federal service for life, and employers across the country learned what they could now get away with. The fortunes at the top began rebuilding.
As long as the Soviet Union existed, the capitalist powers faced a competing social system and greater pressure to make concessions to workers. That pressure disappeared with its collapse. The concentration accelerated in the recovery that followed the 2008 bank crash. The banks were rescued. Working-class households lost their homes.
That acceleration was brought to world attention by Occupy Wall Street. Encampments spread across the country in 2011 and put “the 1%” into everyday language. Millions of people learned to name who owns the country.
The police cleared the encampments that November. The words stayed in the language. The 1% holds more now than it did then.
The organized power of the working class has forced the concentration down before. It left ownership where it was, and the concentration came back.
The question they cannot answer
What has to change is who owns the wealth the working class creates.
That is what the presidency, the Pentagon and the police are being fortified against.
Trump told the generals at Quantico that U.S. cities could be used as “training grounds” and spoke of an “enemy from within.”
The State Department report supplied the names. On its list were the mayors of New York and Los Angeles, members of Congress, the Amazon Labor Union and its founder Christian Smalls, journalists, the National Lawyers Guild, the Venceremos Brigade and Black Lives Matter. Rubio announced a new category, “Far-Left Terrorism,” and said terrorist designations were coming.
The report praises the purges of the 1950s for breaking the Communist Party and the militant labor movement, and offers them as a model now. People were hauled before Congress then and pressed to name others, and refusing cost them their jobs.
The same government denounces what it calls woke. The word came out of Black communities warning each other to watch the police. Lead Belly sang it in 1938 about the Scottsboro Brothers, and it spread again after a police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Pete Hegseth now uses it as an epithet from the Pentagon, and Black Lives Matter sits on a State Department list.
The billionaire class has no answer to the question of who owns the wealth the working class creates.
It has a list of the people who raise the question.
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