chat

They don't really represent factions of capital anymore because they aren't really two distinct parties. The duopoly is just professional wrestling. It's why there's always party realignment. No faction of the bourgeoisie goes all-in on any party. They either hedge their bets, constantly flip-flop, or just pick a party that offers minor perks at best with the understanding that the duopoly upholds US imperialism anyways. Some factions straight up don't care. For example, the MIC does not care who is nominally in charge since the defense budget never goes down and they'll get their massive trillion dollar checks anyways. They don't even care that much about any difference in any geopolitical "vision" offered by the parties since the grift will happen one way or another.

It's like how Democrats are ostentatiously the less pro-police party, but the police departments with the largest funding are all in blue areas while the police in red areas are comparatively underfunded. Which party is really pro-police? To ask and attempt to answer the question is to fall for the duopoly kabuki theatre.

You can see a lot of patterns when you look at donations from companies to political campaigns, and which companies get advertised on partisan media outlets. In general, extractive industries (mining, logging, farming), most manufacturing, and most defense/security companies favor the Republicans, the "higher education professions" (tech, pharma, entertainment) favor the Democrats, while the finance sector leans a little bit toward the Democrats.

Other than a minor dissent over whether we should be tougher on Russia or tougher in China, there currently isn't a substantial conflict between the interests of the national bourgeoisie and those of the international bourgeoisie. But that could change as the Pax Americana ends.

Pre-Trump it was national vs international bourgeoisie, but i's nothing coherent now. The new right wing is an ideologically driven fascist movement. They can, have, and will continue to do things that are against their own material interests, and while material interests have to win out eventually, this can last quite some time before it settles into a new materially-coherent system. The bourgeoisie are reacting to this in different ways.

Some are jumping ship and joining the democrats. And because the democrats are just their donors' interests in a trench coat, you can already see the effects of this with them insistently adopting formerly republican stances.

Some are taking the gamble that they'll be able to steer the disaster in their favor, or maybe get their people entrenched in the party for when this fizzles out and it turns back into a normal bourgeoisie political party. They want to be a disproportionately powerful arm of the new party like the NRA was of the old. This might be why the tech sector has pivoted towards the republicans - they're the biggest in capital terms, but don't have the entrenched power that older industries have.

And some are ideologically committed fascists themselves. They do not need materialist reasons for their support, and thus come from a completely random sampling across industries. This might also be why the tech sector has pivoted towards the republicans - they all have majority share holders that are just some specific asshole from a privileged background.

Historically it’s been “cowboys” vs “yankees” with the cowboys being more focused on extractive industries (mining, farming, fossil fuels) and imperialism in South America via political domination and violence, with the yankees being more about finance, atlanticism, and global imperialism via loans & institutionalism.

But it’s a mistake to view them as two clearly separated and delineated camps, they share more common interests than opposition, and this distinction was more relevant before the tech sector became so dominant.

Also you can see cowboys in the Dems and Yankees in the GOP anyway. The political parties are a uniparty and there are cowboy / yankee factions in both.

It's like cat people and dog people. There are kinda material reasons to be one over the other. Some dogs are ostensibly for security. Cats don't need to be walked every day, or go outside at all, so they accommodate different lifestyles. Fancy dog breeds incur huge vet costs due to their bodies being shaped by the whims of humans playing god. Cats can suck the breath out of a baby.

Not all people are cat or dog people. Some people have neither. They might support a "third pet" like rats or parrots. Abstaining from pets is very common, due to apathy, ideology or gerrymandering. All of these are impacted by materials situation. But a lot of it is just how you grew up. Who you fell in with. Your partner has a dog, you live together, so now you have a dog.

Some people have strong opinions on cats vs dogs. They can come into conflict in apartment living, designating precious urban space for dog parks, a few bad apple cats murdering every bird in a 2 block radius. There are cities where dogs roam in packs, others where cats rule.

For the most part, cat people and dog people live in peace. They contribute to each other by supporting vets and businesses which cater to both of them, so those business are viable. Animal welfare laws, registration programs, and norms regarding treatment benefit both. Resources like animal shelters are shared. And the concept of animal companionship, is normalized. Most people don't care if you are a cat person, dog person, both, neither.

Boof makes a lot of good points, but I'd say at least in recent history there was a heavier petite bourgeois leaning in Republicans compared to Dems, and there are things to be said about factions within the bourgeoisie having relatively different shares as well, though I kind of struggle to make sense of it and it's absolutely not "all the finance ghouls are this color and all the industrialists are that color". Remember that lots of important bourgeois interests give money to both parties because it's not a matter of making Their Guys win so much as making sure that anyone who wins is Their Guy.

That isn't really how it works. The US political system is more of a controlled chaos where anyone with the money and desire to can go buy specific politicians to push their agenda. The party agendas overall tend to be a general support for capitalism and a constant reactionary mess. The forces of capital don't really care what the parties do or which one is in power. Because their entire purpose is to simply play into the most reactionary elements of society and keep the masses distracted and ineffectual at organizing for their own benefit.

If a capitalist needs the government to do something then regardless of their faction (industrialist, rentier, etc) they will just go to whichever politician is most convenient and pay them to push that issue for them.

There is also a general lack of capitalist rationality. That isn't just the same constant contradictions it has had since the beginning. Capitalists generally speaking used to understand their position. Industrialists understood that rentier capitalists had conflicting interests to themselves for example. Now though many of the capitalists themselves are entire caught up in their own narratives. While rational special interests do exist (do not mistake rational for morally good) they are more rare now.

For example a rational special interest group could be a group of importers who push for less tariffs. They have shared business interests and so lobby for that position as a group. This is simply capitalist class solidarity.

But then there are groups that are backed by capitalists that push for random culture war issues or other reactionary things. This is a mix of things. There is the element of the rational capitalists who push these specifically because they know it causes political chaos that makes proletarian organizing more difficult, but there is also the element of capitalists who have a whole hearted belief in these issues.

This is a result of the USA being so dominant and so uncontested in that dominance for decades. When capitalists have no need to have any rationality in order to remain profitable/powerful they lose the ability to act rationally quite fast. It is why the US economy seems so disconnected from physical reality. (ex: Stock market going up while the world is in chaos)

This can only last for so long though and it will inevitably lead to catastrophic economic collapse. As the very institutions that capitalists built to maintain their own control over the society and to keep the status quo stable are now being dismantled by this new generation of capitalist.

To circle back to your question generally the 2 parties serve as a way to deflect blame. Say 30% of voters always vote D and 30% always vote R with 40% being "swing" voters. The capitalists will simply have the D and R use conflicting rhetoric on social issues while doing the same actual overall policies (as they both answer to the same special interests). That way as the 40% get mad at R they swing to D and vice versa. But nothing ever actually changes outside of Rhetoric. Democrats pretend to not want to do genocide in Gaza while doing it anyway. Republicans do it while cheering. Republicans openly brutalize immigrants while Democrats to so quietly. This is how every issue works. They are functionally the same if you look at the actual data but have wildly varying rhetoric.

Edit: the best way to see this clearly is looking at donations. regardless of if they are currently rhetorically or publically in support of one party most special interests will donate to both.

Most large capitalists play both sides and most capitalists are dominated by financial capital which also plays both sides. Labor tends to vote Democrat and the smaller capitalists tend to vote Republican but make no mistake, there isn't a real democracy around what the state should do or how production should be organized. The institutions of the state were made to work against democracy and have only entrenched themselves against it further in the last 60 years or so. They don't even lie about it to us either. They've just conditioned us so well that we don't question why institutions like the courts or the military are supposed to be "apolitical" or even how they can be.

This isn’t an exact answer, but kind of indicative: one poll found that the demo Trump does best with are members of the top 1% of income that didn’t get a college degree. While that’s not an industry in and of itself, it does show a divide between capitalists that see themselves as bootstrapping, entrepreneurial owner-operator-founder kind of capitalists, while Democrats seem to attract the more meritocracy-focused capitalists. The ones that see going to the right schools, getting internships at the marquee consulting firms, working their way up the C suite, as the proper sort of capitalist.

As far as specific industries/sectors, there’s some rough overlaps, as others have said, there’s no rational one-to-one mapping here. Many industries can fail into one or the other, and location can play a big part in how people perceive which industry aligns with which type.

Republicans represent potentially stranded carbon assets and industries: coal, gas, petroleum, plastics, fertilizers, farms, American manufacturing and military parts suppliers that rely heavily on carbon

Democrats serve capital based on insurance, media, banking, finance, real estate, entertainment, half of the wholesale retail sector

The biggest upset of the last few years has been the defection of the Tech sector from nominal alliance with the dems (because that Wallstreet financing was so delicious for years) to now full throated partnership with the Republicans, because the tech lords see carbon as the best bet to power their data centers

Oligarchs vs Corporatists with shades in the middle

The two-party system is a system with two entities put in a regulated competition, the hows and whos of those two entities can vary depending on current needs

They aren't distinct capitalist camps that only slot cleanly into dem vs gop. There are biases and trends but as you might expect from what results the political class actually achieve capital at large just uses whoever is in power and if that isn't working they push towards the other side. As @LittleFellaNamedBoof@hexbear.net said, individual lobbyists make this chaotic.

But also there are some faction aspects. Tech finance was (maybe still is?) more Dem-adjacent, they work more in concert than financialized tech and the GOP. Straight-up military contractors are biased towards Republicans, they do more direct funding and destruction work on average. But if course these are biases, because in both cases you have plenty of tendencies for the exact reversal of party.

I'm not convinced that the major capital factions are generally favor one of two parties. Maybe someone has examples. I think finance capital simply dominates and this is bipartisan.

Education, technocracy and the division between a family-based vision of communalism and a state-based one is, I think, the dividing lines. A preference for Keynesian versus laissez-faire economics.

Both parties share most of their economic and foreign policy objectives. The division is mostly on culture war issues, which I think are influenced indirectly by how both camps earn their money and see the world.

A capitalist in the science and tech sectors is going to be more amenable to "big government" grants, research, contracts etc. because they recognize that those things help their industry. The owner of a restaurant chain is going to feel the opposite - when the government gets involved with them, it's mostly regulatations that cut into profit and make it harder to run their business. (P.S. - and the reason we're seeing "tech sector" go to Republicans coincides with a shift from actual technological innovation to scams that fear regulation).

I've wondered this myself.

I want to think that there must be some sort of material divide between the two parties. On the other hand, it also seems entirely vibes/culture war based maybe even among the leadership.

Ultimately they both work for the same people though.

I think the most historically consistent aspect of the parties is that the Democrats dominate the New York machine and pander to Catholic immigrants, while the Republicans pander to white protestant accountants from Ohio. Everything else has shifted through history like planets around the sun.