Application deadline: April 24, 2025, 11:59 PM
Course title: The Rise and Fall of Ruling Classes in the US: Yesterday and Today
Instructors: Steve Fraser and Doug Henwood
Dates: Alt. Mondays, 7–9pm • May 5, May 19, June 2, June 16, 2025
Location: TBA (Course is in-person only)
Course cost: $35 DSA members / $45 nonmembers
Course description
Steve Fraser and Doug Henwood will explore the more recent history of the American ruling class. After examining the paradoxical relationship between democracy and a ruling class, they will look at the history of the U.S. ruling class from the emergence of the WASPs as a self-conscious formation in the 1880s through their design of the post- World War II order, and their decay in the 1970s. Then they will turn their attention to the rise of new, finance-based elites in the 1980s. The course will analyze the current crisis of the neoliberal ruling class, and conclude by looking at the divisions within the class today from the tech bros and private equity parasites around Trump to the floundering capitalist establishment.
Instructor biographies
Steve Fraser is an historian of American capitalism and labor and author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.
Doug Henwood is an economics journalist and podcast host of Behind the News. He’s the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom.
Course outline
Session 1: Introduction, early history
This introductory session will first of all examine basic questions: What is a ruling class? Is it merely rule by the monied or is it more complicated than that? How does a ruling class form and function in a democracy? How do ruling classes establish their legitimacy and hegemony? Can a ruling class be both parasitic and useful? Is the ruling class different than the political class? How can a capitalist class that is inherently divided and self-interested, nonetheless establish its coherent over-lordship? How right were Marx and Engels when
they said “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Does democracy function as both a form of ruling class legitimacy and as a threat to ruling class power? How do ruling classes die? Will there always be some sort of ruling elite, even as their composition changes?
In the second half of this session, we will address some of these questions concretely. We will look at the era of the “Robber Barons” after the Civil War. Then, the relationship between this pre-ruling class and democracy was a purely hostile one and the State was hardly developed except as an instrument of coercion and plunder. We will as well analyze the obstacles to the creation of a national ruling class in this period.
Session 2: WASPs and New Dealers
This session will begin by exploring the crystallization in the late 19th century of a self-conscious ruling class formation, the WASP elite. It exercised pre-eminence in domestic economic affairs and presided over the birth of American imperialism abroad. We will look at its interior social cohesion and self-confidence as well as its sense of social responsibility and its social unconsciousness.
The WASP elite was no friend of democracy. The second half of this session will examine the crisis it faced in the Great Depression and the rise of a new ruling class formation that created the New Deal and ushered in a period of democratic capitalism. It will look at the fracturing of the capitalist class during the crisis and at the emergence of what we now think of as the post-war Establishment which included key members of the old WASP elite. The session concludes with the crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s that undermined the New Deal ruling elite.
Session 3: The Rise of the Counter-Establishment in the 1970s and 1980s
This session examines how the crisis of the New Deal order led to the emergence of a class consciousness on the part of the business community in which, for a time, it subdued its more parochial self-interests. This “class for itself” formation, responding both to international competitive pressures and to the insupportable labor, welfare, and regulatory costs of democratic capitalism sought to dismantle that order and replaced it with neoliberalism. This “class for itself” moment did not last that long and we will try to figure out why.
The session will analyze the changing relationship between finance and industrial capitalism in this age of deindustrialization. How did that shift in the center of economic gravity redefine the strategic outlook of ruling elites? How did it alter their electoral/social constituencies? What were the continuities and discontinuities between the ruling strata summarized by the names Reagan and Clinton? While neoliberal ideology seemed anti-statist, the order actually relied heavily on the state. What is the significance for ruling class consciousness and policy if the basis of their wealth moves from industrial accumulation to asset appreciation?
Session 4: To the Present and its Choices: Barbarism or Socialism
While neo-liberalism was a bipartisan persuasion, this session begins with the 9/11 national security and 2008 financial crises of the Bush administrations. It will delve into the rise of the right-wing business class personified by the Koch brothers whose power precedes and then crests with Trump and his alliance with a section of the tech elite. What sectors of the economy prevail in this new milieu? Where does this leave the neoliberal Democrats? Does a new form of dynastic capitalism replace the old corporate-managerial elite? Are these dynasts reminiscent of the old Robber Barons? Are they even more extremely uncivilized? Can we even speak of a coherent ruling class today? Has the liberal bourgeoisie, genuflecting to Trump, decayed beyond redemption? Is democratic capitalism even a feasible option anymore? Is it now, as our political forebears believed, a choice of either barbarism or socialism?
Readings
TBA
About the NYC DSA Academy for Socialist Education
Education,
broadly defined, is and always has been a vital function of
revolutionary socialist movements. The NYC DSA Academy aims to enhance
the ongoing political education efforts of the New York chapter of DSA.
Designed to connect the history and theory of socialist struggles with
the work of today’s activists, the Academy aims to offer a rigorous but
accessible curriculum for working adults to develop their understanding
and strategy.
