The American Oligarchy
Paul Cockshott
Abstract
This article, The American Oligarchy, revisits the Marxist critique of bourgeois democracy through an analysis of the historical evolution of the U.S. state, arguing that the United States was never a democracy but an oligarchy structured to preserve class domination. Beginning with empirical evidence from the 2014 Princeton study by Gilens and Page, which demonstrated the near-total political irrelevance of the average citizen in shaping policy, Paul Cockshott situates this within a longue durée Marxist interpretation of American political development. Drawing on Lenin, Mao, and classical political theory, the paper argues that the U.S. Constitution was consciously modeled on the Roman Republic — a system designed to give the appearance of popular participation while ensuring the rule of a propertied elite. The essay traces this oligarchic continuity through the slave-owning foundations of the early republic, the class contradictions of the Civil War, the populist and New Deal interludes, and the neoliberal consolidation of the late twentieth century. Ultimately, Cockshott concludes that U.S. institutions, by design, preclude democratic transformation and that only revolutionary rupture — comparable to the cataclysms that overthrew other imperial systems — can dismantle the entrenched rule of capital. The paper’s synthesis of historical materialism and quantitative political science challenges liberal narratives of American exceptionalism and underscores the structural permanence of class power within U.S. governance.
Keywords
American oligarchy, bourgeois democracy, class struggle, U.S. Constitution, Marxist political theory, Paul Cockshott
