By JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER*

The Illusion of Liberal Democracy: How the US Financial Oligarchy Consolidated Its Class Power and Why the Left Insists on Not Seeing It

1.

American capitalism has, over the past century, had arguably the most powerful and class-conscious ruling class in world history, encompassing both the economy and the state, and projecting its hegemony both domestically and globally. At the heart of its rule is an ideological apparatus that insists that the immense economic power of the capitalist class does not translate into political governance, and that no matter how polarized American society becomes economically, its democratic claims remain intact.

According to the dominant ideology, the interests of the ultra-rich who rule the market do not rule the state – a separation crucial to the idea of ​​liberal democracy. This prevailing ideology, however, is now disintegrating in the face of the structural crisis of US and global capitalism and the decline of the liberal-democratic state itself, leading to deep divisions in the ruling class and a new domination of the state by the openly capitalist right.

In his farewell address to the nation, days before Donald Trump triumphantly returned to the White House, former President Joe Biden indicated that a high-tech “oligarchy” that relies on “dark money” in politics was threatening American democracy. Senator Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, warned of the effects of the concentration of wealth and power on a new hegemony of the “ruling class” and the abandonment of any vestige of working-class support in either major party.¹

Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House for the second time does not mean that the capitalist oligarchy has suddenly become a dominant influence in US politics, since this has in fact been a long-standing reality. However, the entire political milieu in recent years, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, has been moving to the right, while the oligarchy exercises more direct influence over the state.

A sector of the US capitalist class is now openly in control of the ideological state apparatus in a neo-fascist government in which the former establishment neoliberalism is a junior partner. The goal of this shift is a regressive restructuring of the United States into a permanent war posture, resulting from the decline of US hegemony and the instability of US capitalism, as well as the need for a more concentrated capitalist class to ensure more centralized control of the state.

2.

In the Cold War years following World War II, the guardians of the liberal-democratic order within academia and the media sought to downplay the primary role in the US economy of industrial and financial owners, who were supposedly displaced by the “managerial revolution” or constrained by “countervailing power.”

In this view, owners and managers, capital and labor, each constrained the other. Later, in a somewhat more refined version of this general perspective, the concept of a hegemonic capitalist class under monopoly capitalism was dissolved into the more amorphous category of the “corporate rich.”²

U.S. democracy, it was argued, was the product of the interaction of pluralistic groups or, in some cases, mediated by a power elite. There was no functional hegemonic ruling class in the economic and political domains. Even if it could be argued that there was a dominant capitalist class in the economy, it supposedly did not rule the state, which was independent.

This has been conveyed in various ways throughout the archetypal works of the pluralist tradition, from The managerial revolution (1941), by James Burnham, Capitalism, socialism and democracy (1942), by Joseph A. Schumpeter, the Who governs? (1961), by Robert Dahl), The New Industrial State (1967), by John Kenneth Galbraith, ranging from the conservative to the liberal end of the spectrum.³

All of these works were designed to suggest that pluralism or a managerial/technocratic elite prevailed in U.S. politics—not a capitalist class governing the economic and political systems. In the pluralist view of actually existing democracy, first introduced by Schumpeter, politicians were simply political entrepreneurs competing for votes, just as economic entrepreneurs in the so-called free market produce a system of “competitive leadership.”⁴

In promoting the fiction that the United States, despite the vast power of the capitalist class, remained an authentic democracy, the received ideology was refined and reinforced by leftist analyses that sought to bring the dimension of power back into state theory, replacing the then-dominant pluralist views of figures like Robert Dahl, while rejecting the notion of a ruling class.

The most important work that represents this change was The Power Elite (1956) by C. Wright Mills, who argued that the conception of the “ruling class,” associated particularly with Marxism, should be replaced by the notion of a tripartite “power elite,” in which the U.S. power structure was seen as dominated by elites drawn from the corporate rich, the military brass, and elected politicians. Wright Mills referred to the notion of the ruling class as a “shortcut theory” that simply assumed that economic dominance meant political dominance.

Directly challenging Karl Marx's concept of the ruling class, Wright Mills stated: "The American government is not, either simply or as a structural fact, a committee of the 'ruling class.' It is a network of 'committees,' and men of other ranks besides the corporate rich sit on these committees."⁵

Wright Mills's view of the ruling class and power elite has been challenged by radical theorists, particularly Paul M. Sweezy in Monthly Review and initially by the work of G. William Domhoff in the first edition of his Who Rules America? (1967). But it ended up gaining considerable influence on the broad left.⁶ As Domhoff would argue in 1968, in C. Wright Mills and “The Power Elite”, the concept of the power elite was commonly seen as “the bridge between the Marxist and pluralist positions (…) It is a necessary concept because not all national leaders are members of the upper class. In this sense, it is a modification and extension of the concept of the 'ruling class'.”⁷

3.

The question of the ruling class and the state was at the center of the debate between Marxist theorists Ralph Miliband, author of The State in Capitalist Society (1969), and Nicos Poulantzas, author of Political Power and Social Classes (1968), representing the so-called “instrumentalist” and “structuralist” approaches to the state in capitalist society. The debate revolved around the “relative autonomy” of the state in relation to the capitalist ruling class, a crucial issue for the prospects of a social-democratic movement taking over the state.⁸

The debate took an extreme form in the United States with the appearance of Fred Block's influential essay “The ruling class does not rule” em Socialist Revolution in 1977, in which Fred Block argued that the capitalist class lacked the class consciousness necessary to translate its economic power into state dominance.⁹ Such a vision, he argued, was necessary to make social democratic politics viable.

Following Donald Trump's defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Fred Block's original article was reprinted in the magazine Jacobin with a new epilogue by Fred Block arguing that since the ruling class did not govern, Joe Biden had the freedom to institute a working-class-friendly policy along the lines of New Deal, which would prevent the re-election of a right-wing figure – one “with much more skill and ruthlessness” than Donald Trump – in 2024.¹⁰

Given the contradictions of the Joe Biden administration and the second coming of Donald Trump, with thirteen billionaires now in his cabinet, the whole long debate about the ruling class and the state needs to be re-examined.¹¹

4.

In the history of political theory, from antiquity to the present, the state has been classically understood in relation to class. In ancient society and under feudalism, unlike in modern capitalist society, there was no clear distinction between civil society (or the economy) and the state. As Karl Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State in 1843, “the abstraction of the”State as such” was not born until the modern world because the abstraction of private life was not created until modern times. The abstraction of political state is a modern product”, fully realized only under the rule of the bourgeoisie.¹²

This was later reaffirmed by Karl Polanyi in terms of the embedded nature of the economy in the ancient polis and its disembedded character under capitalism, manifested in separation of the public sphere of the State and the private sphere of the market.¹³ In Greek antiquity, when social conditions had not yet generated such abstractions, there was no doubt that the ruling class governed the polis and created its laws. Aristotle in his Politics, as Ernest Barker wrote in The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, took the position that class dominance explained the polis: “Tell me the class that is predominant, one might say, and I will tell you the Constitution.”¹⁴

Under the capitalist regime, by contrast, the state is conceived as separate from civil society/economy. Thus, the question arises whether the class that governs the economy – i.e. the capitalist class – also governs the state.

Marx's own views on this were complex, never deviating from the notion that the state in capitalist society was ruled by the capitalist class, while acknowledging varying historical conditions that modified this. On the one hand, he argued (along with Frederick Engels) in The Communist Manifesto that “The executive of the modern State is only a committee for managing the common affairs of the entire bourgeoisie.”¹⁵

This suggested that the state, or its executive branch, had a relative autonomy that went beyond individual capitalist interests, but was nevertheless responsible for administering the general interests of the class. This could, as Marx indicated elsewhere, result in major reforms, such as the passing of the ten-hour working day legislation in his time, which, although it seemed to be a concession to the working class and opposed to capitalist interests, was necessary to secure the future of capital accumulation itself by regulating the labour force and ensuring the continued reproduction of labour power.¹⁶

On the other hand, in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx pointed to quite different situations in which the capitalist class did not govern the State directly, giving way to a semi-autonomous government, as long as this did not interfere with its economic ends and its ultimate command of the State.¹⁷ He also recognized that the state can be dominated by one faction of capital over another. In all these respects, Marx emphasized the relative autonomy of the state from capitalist interests, which has been crucial to all Marxist theories of the state in capitalist society.

It has long been understood that the capitalist class has various means of functioning as a ruling class through the state, even in the case of a liberal democratic order. On the one hand, this takes the form of quite direct investiture in the political apparatus through various mechanisms, such as economic and political control of political party machines and the direct occupation by capitalists and their representatives of key positions in the political command structure.

Capitalist interests in the United States today have the power to decisively influence elections. Moreover, capitalist power over the state extends far beyond elections. Control of the central bank, and thus of the money supply, interest rates, and regulation of the financial system, is essentially handed over to the banks themselves.

On the other hand, the capitalist class controls the state indirectly through its vast external economic class power, including direct financial pressures, lobbying, funding of pressure groups and think tanks, the revolving door between key government and business actors, and control of the cultural and communications apparatus. No political regime in a capitalist system can survive unless it serves the interests of profit and capital accumulation, an ever-present reality that all political actors face.

The complexity and ambiguity of the Marxist approach to the ruling class and the state was conveyed by Karl Kautsky in 1902 when he declared that “the capitalist class dominates but does not govern”; later adding that “it is content to dominate the government.”¹⁸

As noted, it was precisely this question of the relative autonomy of the state from the capitalist class that governed the famous debate between what came to be known as the instrumentalist versus structuralist theories of the state, represented respectively by Ralph Miliband in Britain and Nicos Poulantzas in France. Ralph Miliband's views were very much determined by the demise of the British Labour Party as a genuine socialist party in the late 1950s, as described in his Parliamentary Socialism.¹⁹

This forced him to confront the enormous power of the capitalist class as the ruling class. This was later taken up in his The State in Capitalist Society in 1969, in which he wrote that “whether it is … appropriate to speak of a ‘ruling class’ is one of the main themes of this study. Indeed, “the most important of all the questions raised by the existence of such a ruling class is whether it also constitutes a ‘governing class.’”

The capitalist class, he sought to demonstrate, while “not, properly speaking, a ‘ruling class’” in the same sense that the aristocracy had been, did in fact rule capitalist society quite directly (as well as indirectly). It translated its economic power in various ways into political power, to the point that for the working class to challenge the ruling class effectively it had to oppose the structure of the capitalist state itself.²⁰

5.

It was here that Nicos Poulantzas, who published his Political Power and Social Classes in 1968 he came into conflict with Ralph Miliband. Nicos Poulantzas further emphasized the relative autonomy of the state, seeing Ralph Miliband's approach to the state as assuming too direct rule by the capitalist class, even if it was in line with most of Marx's works on the subject.

Nicos Poulantzas emphasized that capitalist state rule was more indirect and structural than direct and instrumental, allowing room for a greater variation of governments in class terms, including not only specific fractions of the capitalist class but also representatives of the working class itself. “The direct participation of the members of the capitalist class in the state apparatus and government, even where it exists,” he wrote, “is not the important side of the question. The relationship between the bourgeois class and the state is a objective relation … The direct participation of members of the ruling class in the state apparatus is not the cause, but the effect of this objective coincidence”.²¹

While such a statement may have seemed reasonable enough in the qualified terms in which it was expressed, it tended to remove the role of the ruling class as a class-conscious subject. Writing during the height of Eurocommunism on the Continent, Nicos Poulantzas’s structuralism, with its emphasis on Bonapartism pointing to a high degree of relative autonomy of the state, seemed to open the way for a conception of the state as an entity in which the capitalist class did not rule, even though the state was subject to objective forces arising from capitalism.

Such a view, Ralph Miliband countered, pointed to an “overdeterminist” or economistic view of the state characteristic of the “ultra-left drift” or a “right drift” in the form of social democracy, which typically denied the existence of an overtly ruling class.²² In both cases, the reality of the capitalist ruling class and the various processes by which it exercised its rule, as the empirical research of Ralph Miliband and others had amply demonstrated, appeared to be short-circuited, no longer part of the development of a strategy of class struggle from below.

A decade later, in his 1978 work State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas shifted his emphasis to advocate parliamentary socialism and social democracy (or “democratic socialism”), insisting on the need to retain much of the existing state apparatus in any transition to socialism. This directly contradicted Marx’s emphases on The Civil War in France and Vladimir Lenin in The State and the Revolution on the need to replace the capitalist state of the ruling class with a new political command structure that would emanate from below.²³

Influenced by Paul Sweezy's articles on “The American Ruling Class"and "Power Elite or Ruling Class?” in Monthly Review and by The Power Elite by Mills, in the first edition of his book, Who rules America? in 1967 Domhoff promoted an explicit class-based analysis, but nevertheless indicated that he preferred the more neutral “ruling class” to the “dominant class” on the grounds that “the notion of a ruling class” suggested a “Marxist view of history.”²⁴

However, at the time he wrote The powers that be: processes of ruling class domination in America, Domhoff, in 1978, influenced by the radical atmosphere of the time, began to argue that “a ruling class is a privileged social class that is able to maintain its top position in the social structure.” The power elite was redefined as the “leading arm” of the ruling class.²⁵

However, this explicit integration of the ruling class into Domhoff's analysis was short-lived. In subsequent editions of Who rules America?, until the eighth edition in 2022, he bowed to liberal practicality and abandoned the concept of a ruling class altogether. Instead, he followed Mills in grouping owners (“the upper social class”) and managers into the category of “the corporate rich.”²⁶

The power elite were seen as CEOs, directors, and boards of directors, overlapping in a Venn diagram with the upper social class (which also consisted of socialites and jet setters), the corporate community and the policy planning network. This constituted a perspective known as power structure research. The notions of capitalist class and ruling class were no longer found.

6.

A more significant empirical and theoretical work than that offered by Domhoff, and in many respects more pertinent today, was written in 1962-1963 by the Soviet economist Stanislav Menshikov and translated into English in 1969 under the title Millionaires and managers. Stanislav Menshikov was part of an educational exchange of scientists between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1962. He visited “the chairman, president, and vice presidents of dozens of corporations and 13 of the 25 commercial banks” that had assets of a billion dollars or more.

He met with Henry Ford II, Henry S. Morgan, and David Rockefeller, among others.²⁷ Stanislav Menshikov's detailed empirical treatment of the financial control of corporations in the United States and the ruling group or class provided a solid assessment of the continued dominance of finance capitalists among the very wealthy. Through its hegemony over various financial groups, the financial oligarchy has differentiated itself from the mere top managers (CEOs) of corporate financial bureaucracies.

Although there was what might be called a “millionaire-manager bloc” in the sense of Mills’s “corporate rich” and a division of labor within the “ruling class itself,” the “financial oligarchy, that is, the group of people whose economic power is based on the disposal of colossal masses of fictitious capital … [and] which is the basis of all the major financial groups”, and not the corporate executives as such, had all the control. Moreover, the relative power of the financial oligarchy continued to grow rather than diminish.²⁸

As in Sweezy's analysis of “Interest Groups in the American Economy,” written for the Structure of the American Economy from the National Resources Committee during the New Deal, Stanislav Menshikov's detailed analysis of corporate groups in the US economy captured the continuing family dynastic basis of much of US wealth.²⁹

The US financial oligarchy constituted a ruling class, but one that generally did not rule directly or without interference. The “economic domination of the financial oligarchy,” wrote Stanislav Menshikov, “is not equivalent to its political domination. But the latter without the former may not be strong enough, while the former without the latter shows that the coalescence of monopolies and the state machinery has not gone far enough. But even in the United States, where both these prerequisites are present, where the government machinery has served the monopolies for decades and the dominance of the latter in the economy is beyond doubt, the political power of the financial oligarchy is constantly threatened by restrictions on the part of other classes of society and is sometimes actually limited. But the general tendency is that the economic power of the financial oligarchy is gradually transformed into political power.”³⁰

The financial oligarchy, Stanislav Menshikov argued, had as its junior allies in its political dominance of the state: corporate managers; the top brass of the armed forces; professional politicians, who internalized the internal needs of the capitalist system; and the white elite who dominated the system of racial segregation in the South.³¹

But the financial oligarchy itself was the increasingly dominant force. “The struggle of the financial oligarchy for direct administration of the state is one of the most characteristic tendencies of American imperialism in recent decades,” resulting from its growing economic power and the needs it generated. However, this was not a smooth process. The financial capitalists in the United States do not act “united” and are divided into competing factions, while they are hampered in their attempts to control the state by the very complexities of the US political system, in which many different actors play a role.³²

“It would seem,” wrote Stanislav Menshikov, “that now the political power of the financial oligarchy is fully secured, but this is not the case. The machinery of a contemporary capitalist state is large and cumbersome. Seizing positions in one part does not guarantee control over the entire mechanism. The financial oligarchy owns the propaganda machine, is able to bribe politicians and government officials in the center and on the periphery [of the country], but cannot bribe the people who, despite all the restrictions of bourgeois “democracy,” elect the legislature. The people do not have much choice, but without formally abolishing democratic procedures, the financial oligarchy cannot fully secure itself against undesirable “accidents.”³³

7.

However, the extraordinary work of Stanislav Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, published in the Soviet Union, had no influence on the discussion of the ruling class in the United States. The general trend, reflected in Domhoff's changes (and in Europe by Poulantzas's changes), downplayed the whole idea of ​​a ruling class and even a capitalist class, replacing it with the concepts of corporate wealth and the power elite, producing what was essentially a form of elite theory.

The rejection of the concept of a ruling class (or even a governing class) in Domhoff's later work coincided with the publication of The Ruling Class Does Not Rule, by Block, who played a significant role in radical thought in the United States. Writing at a time when the election of Jimmy Carter as president seemed to liberals and social democrats to present the image of a leadership distinctly more moral and progressive in character, Block argued that there existed no ruling class with decisive power over the political sphere in the United States and in capitalism in general.

He attributed this to the fact that not only the capitalist class but also separate “fractions” of the capitalist class (here opposing Poulantzas) lacked class consciousness and were therefore incapable of acting in their own interests in the political sphere, much less governing the body politic. Instead, he adopted a “structuralist” approach based on Max Weber’s notion of rationalization, in which the state “rationalized” the roles of three competing actors: (i) capitalists, (ii) state managers, and (iii) the working class. The relative autonomy of the state in capitalist society was a function of its role as a neutral arbiter, in which various forces interfered but none governed.³⁴

Attacking those who argued that the capitalist class had a dominant role within the state, Block wrote: “the way to formulate a critique of instrumentalism that does not collapse is to reject the idea of ​​a class-conscious ruling class,” since a class-conscious capitalist class would strive to rule. Although he noted that Marx had used the notion of a class-conscious ruling class, this was dismissed as merely “political shorthand” for structural determinations.

Block made it clear that when radicals like himself chose to criticize the notion of a ruling class, they “usually did so in order to justify reformist socialist politics.” In this spirit, he insisted that the capitalist class did not intentionally, consciously, rule the state through internal or external means. Rather, the structural constraint on “business confidence,” exemplified by the booms and busts of the stock market, ensured that the political system remained in equilibrium with the economy, requiring political actors to adopt rational means to ensure economic stability. The rationalization of capitalism by the state, in Block’s “structuralist” view, thus paved the way for a social democratic politics of the state.³⁵

What is clear is that by the late 1970s Western Marxist thinkers had almost entirely abandoned the notion of a ruling class, conceiving of the state not just as relatively autonomous, but in fact largely autonomous of the class power of capital. This was part of a general “class retreat.”³⁶

In Britain, Geoff Hodgson wrote in his The Democratic Economy: A New Look at Planning, Markets and Power in 1984 that “the very idea of ​​a ‘ruling’ class must be challenged. At best, it is a weak and misleading metaphor. It is possible to speak of a ruling class in a society, but only in virtue of the dominance of a particular type of economic structure. To say that a class ‘rules’ is to say much more. It is to imply that it is somehow implanted in the apparatus of government.”

It was crucial, he argued, to abandon the Marxist notion that associated “different modes of production with different ‘ruling classes’.”³⁷ Like the later Poulantzas and Block, Hodgson adopted a social democratic position that saw no ultimate contradiction between parliamentary democracy as it had emerged within capitalism and the transition to socialism.

*John Bellamy Foster is an editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon..

Translation: Marcos Montenegro for the website Other words.

Notes

1.  “Full Transcript of President Biden's Farewell Address, New York Times, January 15, 2025; Bernie Sanders, “The US Has a Ruling Class—And Americans Must Stand Up to It,” Guardian, September 2, 2022.
2. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (London: Putnam and Co., 1941); John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1952); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 147–70.
3. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1942), 269–88; Robert Dahl, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale, 1961); John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: New American Library, 1967, 1971).
4. C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 77–92.
5. Mills, The Power Elite, 170, 277.
6. Paul M. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 92–109; G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1st edition, 1967), 7–8, 141–42.
7. G. William Domhoff, “The Power Elite and Its Critics,” in C. Wright Mills and The Power Elite, eds. G. William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 276.
8. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1975); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1969).
9. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” Socialist Revolution, no. 33 (May–June 1977): 6–28. In 1978, the year after the publication of Block's article, the title of Socialist Revolution was changed to Socialist Review, reflecting the journal's explicit shift to a social-democratic political view.
10. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” 2020 reprint with epilogue, Jacobin, April 24, 2020.
11. Peter Charalambous, Laura Romeo, and Soo Rin Kim, "Trump Has Tapped an Unprecedented 13 Billionaires for His Administration. Here's Who They Are," ABC News, December 17, 2024.
12. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1974), 90.
13. Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, eds. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957), 64–96.
14. Ernest Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), 317; John Hoffman, “The Problem of the Ruling Class in Classical Marxist Theory,” Science and Society 50, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 342–63.
15. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 5.
16. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 333–38, 393–98.
17. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963).
18. Karl Kautsky quoted in Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 51.
19. Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961).
20. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 16, 29, 45, 51–52, 55.
21. Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” in Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, ed. Robin Blackburn (New York: Vintage, 1973), 245.
22. Ralph Miliband, “Reply to Nicos Poulantzas,” in Ideology in Social Science, ed. Blackburn, 259–60.
23. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); VI Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 25, 345–539. On Poulantzas's shift to social democracy, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1998), 43–46.
24. Domhoff, Who Rules America? (1967 edition), 1–2, 3; Paul M. Sweezy, The Present as History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953), 120–38.
25. G. William Domhoff, The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domination in America (New York: Vintage, 1978), 14.
26. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (London: Routledge, 8th edition, 2022), 85–87. In the 1967 edition of his book, Domhoff had critically commented on Mills's lumping of the very rich (the owners) and the managers together in the category of the corporate rich, thereby erasing crucial questions. Domhoff, Who Rules America? (1967 edition), 141. On the concept of liberal practicality see C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination” (New York: Oxford, 1959), 85–86; John Bellamy Foster, “Liberal Practicality and the US Left,” in Socialist Register 1990: The Retreat of the Intellectuals, eds. Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch, and John Saville (London: Merlin Press, 1990), 265–89.
27. Stanislav Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 5–6.
28. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 7, 321.
29. Sweezy, The Present as History158-88.
30. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 322.
31. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers324-25.
32. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 325, 327.
33. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers323-24.
34. Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” 6–8, 10, 15, 23; Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1375–80.
35. Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” 9–10, 28.
36. wood, The Retreat from Class.
37. Geoff Hodgson, The Democratic Economy: A New Look at Planning, Markets and Power (London: Penguin, 1984), 196.
    
    

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