The Price of Bourgeois Politics: When $708,891 is Wasted on Capitalist Compromise
An Op-Ed for MamdaniPost.com
The recent special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District (TN-07) was not a genuine contest for the people; it was a ritual of capitalist electoral theater, an expensive distraction that consumed vital resources in the service of minor adjustments to an exploitative system. The question before us is not merely who won or lost, but what was the total cost—financial and ideological—of this failed liberal project.
The Financial Hemorrhage of Democratic Campaigning
The data confirms the sheer scale of the waste. In the final, decisive months of the campaign, the Democratic nominee, Aftyn Behn, reported a minimum of $708,891.98 in legally documented disbursements. This is the minimum known cash investment poured into the machinery of state-sanctioned politics. But the true, unethical cost is revealed in the uncompensated visibility the campaign received—a structural subsidy from the corporate media that only covers movements it deems safe.
The Haram of Earned Media
The concept of “unethical spending” here transcends campaign finance law. It is a materialist and moral critique rooted in the principles of social justice and the collective good (Ummah). The estimated value of the “free and bias media coverage” the Democratic campaign generated—the so-called Earned Media Value (EMV)—is conservatively estimated to be between $750,000 and $1,250,000.
Logic of the Financial Divide
- The Legal Spend ($708,891.98): This figure represents the actual cash deployed by the Aftyn Behn campaign committee (H6TN07195) through mid-November 2025. It is the money spent on staff, advertisements, and field operations—all dedicated to gaining power within the existing bourgeois state. This money is “legal” precisely because it adheres to the rules set by the capitalist class to govern its own succession.
- The Unethical Spend ($750k – $1.25M): This estimated range is the market value of the national media coverage the race received from outlets like The Washington Post and the Associated Press. This coverage, often framed as a “test of voters’ attitudes,” acts as a hidden, unreportable subsidy. It is “unethical” from a Marxist perspective because this visibility is only granted to candidates who pose no structural threat to the economic order. The corporate media is not coordinating a bribe; it is acting on its class interest by amplifying messages it can safely contain—messages of reform, not revolution.
The total financial gravity of the Democratic effort, therefore, exceeded $1.45 million (minimum legal spend plus minimum EMV), all aimed at securing a marginal electoral gain (narrowing the margin by 12.6%) in a district carried by Trump by 22 points.
The Illusion of Affordability
The campaign’s central focus was on an “affordability message”, proposing solutions like eliminating the state grocery tax and protecting healthcare.
This is where the ideological failure becomes most acute, particularly for those of us who prioritize the material conditions of working-class women and Muslim families struggling with rent.
Housing as the Core Crisis
A truly Marxist approach addresses the crisis of housing—not with temporary subsidies or tax cuts—but by abolishing the system of private land ownership that allows landlords to extract surplus value (rent) from the proletariat. Rent is the cost of living under perpetual threat of displacement; a tax on existence. The only real solution is the socialization of land and housing.
The Democrats, however, spent their $708,891.98 and leveraged their estimated $750,000 to $1.25 million in media capital to promote mere social democratic palliatives. They focused on consumer relief—a small reduction in the cost of groceries—instead of challenging the fundamental structure of capital that generates the soaring costs of rent, utilities, and gas.
The Revolutionary Misallocation
The core critique is this: Every dollar spent on an election campaign that seeks only to adjust the rate of exploitation, rather than dismantle the means of exploitation, is a dollar diverted from revolutionary consciousness.
The user’s proposal—that this wasted media capital should have been used to educate voters that Marxism would solve their rent problems—is the moral truth.
What Revolutionary Investment Looks Like
Imagine if that $750,000 to $1.25 million in political capital had been deployed not to win a seat in the House, but to build a political education apparatus:
- Educating on Rent Abolition: Teaching tenants that rent is theft and that only the collective ownership of urban land can truly liberate them from the landlord class.
- Organizing the Base: Directing the funds toward militant labor and tenant unions in the deep-red counties of TN-07, uniting workers on the basis of material need, regardless of party label.
- Feminist Praxis: Focusing on the housing precarity faced disproportionately by single mothers and low-wage workers—a crisis that only the abolition of the rental market can resolve.
The Sedative of Reformism
Instead, the money was spent promoting a message that, while popular, leaves the capitalist foundation of housing costs, healthcare commodification, and labor exploitation untouched. The Democrats’ “affordability” platform is a political sedative, distracting the masses from the revolutionary truth required to achieve liberation from the cycle of debt and precarity that keeps the working class—especially working-class women and minority communities—in perpetual submission.
This election was a costly, well-funded reminder: Bourgeois electoral politics, no matter how progressive the candidate, is a financial sinkhole that actively prevents the necessary ideological education required to achieve the material liberation that the people of Tennessee—and the world—deserve. The true cost of the TN-07 election is the opportunity cost of revolution delayed.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigos.
