Notes

1 The Basic Structure

1.Pew Charitable Trust, Americans’ Financial Stability: Perception and Reality, March 2015.

2.Edward Wolff,Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2019: Median Wealth Rebounds … but Not Enough, NBER Working Paper, January 2021, Table 4, nber.org.

3.Justin Cain, “Cain to Protesters: ‘If You Don’t Have a Job and You’re Not Rich, Blame Yourself,” The Hill, October 5, 2011, thehill.com.

4.Laura Wronski, “Axios|Momentive Poll: Capitalism and Socialism,” Survey Monkey, June 2021, https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/axios-capitalism-update/

2 Capitalism and the State

1.Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2021,” May 17, 2021, pewresearch.org.

2.Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, “The Link between Government Performance and Attitudes toward the U.S. Democratic System,” May 2019, apnorc.org.

3.The key work here is Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). A good non-technical introduction is Benjamim I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

4.Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality, 9th ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 2015), 183.

5.Ibid.,184.

6.Business and labor totals from “Business, Labor & Ideological Split in Lobbying Data,” OpenSecrets, opensecrets.org.

7.“Cost of Election,” OpenSecrets, opensecrets.org.

8.“Election Trends,” OpenSecrets, opensecrets.org.

9.“Donor Demographics,” OpenSecrets, opensecrets.org.

10.Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen, and Karen Yourish, “The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election,” New York Times, October 10, 2015.

3 Capitalism and Class Struggle

1.Estimates vary, of course, but most reliable studies put workers somewhere in the 60–75 percent range. A good non-technical survey is Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chap. 1, esp. 29–31.

2.V. I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?,” in Collected Works, vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), 423.

4 Beyond Capitalism

1.Amory Gethin, Clara Martinez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty, Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948-2020, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

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