When communists talk of a “ruling class,” many people smugly dismiss it as a paranoid conspiracy theory.  
The wealthiest top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. controls a larger share of the national wealth (35.4 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (23.3 percent). And their share is growing. Between 1985 and 2010 nearly three quarters of all wealth gains went to the top 5 percent  with the bottom 60 percent seeing a net loss. (EPI, The State of Working America)
The current economic crisis is accelerating the funneling of money and wealth to the top. A study by Emmanuel Saez found that between 2009 and 2010 (the first year of the supposed recovery), the top 1percent seized 93 percent of all income gains, validating former treasury secretary Andrew Mellon’s 1929 statement that “In a depression, assets return to their rightful owners” (Striking it Richer, 3/2/2012).
A new study in the forthcoming issue of Perspectives in Politics (Fall 2014) shows that the ruling class shapes public opinion policy. The authors, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, studied 1,779 national policy initiatives pursued between 1981 and 2002 in the U.S. comparing elite opinion with that of the general public and then analyzing which direction policy went. The results are indisputable:
“In the United States… the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose… even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
When the working class does get a policy they generally favor, it is “only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.” Any feeling of political efficacy among individual workers is purely coincidental. Ultimately the policy preferences of the working class “appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Gilens and Page’s study conclusively shows that individual capitalists and business lobbyists (representing organized groups of capitalists) shape the political landscape in the U.S. In short, a ruling class of individuals making up only a tiny segment of the population wield most—if not all—formal political power. This finding is bolstered by a recent report done by Demos, a research and policy center,  breaking down support for raising the federal minimum wage. The study found that while 78 percent of the general public (the bottom 99 percent of earners) support a hike in the minimum wage 60 percent of the wealthy (the top 1 percent) oppose it. Thus, when Congress recently refused to move on a bill to raise the minimum wage, they were simply carrying out their mandate to represent the capitalist class.
Of course this is nothing new. In the mid-19th century Marx wrote that all states, no matter what their superficial appearance (democracy, monarchy) are in essence class dictatorships. In a capitalist state, capitalists rule. Those capitalists who wield the most influence make up the ruling class. As the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Jay stated upon the country’s founding, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” It is indisputable that in the U.S., a very small percentage of people own most of the country and they govern it. The ruling class may conspire, but they are no conspiracy theory.