Self-Rule in the Balance

Abstract

Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (London: Routledge, 2014), 252 pages, $30.95, paperback.In They Rule, Paul Street offers a thorough deconstruction of the status quo of U.S. capitalism. The book's subtitle gives a nod to the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose main victory was to popularize the concept of U.S. class conflict, as embodied in the "1 percent." The title also recalls John Carpenter's 1987 film They Live, a sci-fi spoof of the Reagan era that prefigured the Occupy revolt. Carpenter's characters don "magic sunglasses" for intellectual defense against media misinformation.… One current form of that misinformation is the view that the Democratic Party exercises "left" politics. Street smashes this notion.… [However,] this is no academic query.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.