The Ruling Class Doesn’t Rule — But It’s Got Veto Power

Capitalists don’t need to directly govern the state, or even be particularly organized, in order to get what they want.

In the 1970s, amid economic stagnation and rising class conflict, the Left returned to a question that had long bedeviled it: the role of the state in capitalist society. Fred Block’s 1977 article “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” first published in Socialist Revolution, is perhaps the clearest articulation of a structuralist approach to this […]

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