Let's look at what Mills actually said in The Power Elite (1956): <blockquote>'Ruling class' is a badly loaded phrase. 'Class' is an economic term; 'rule' a political one. The phrase, 'ruling class,' thus contains the theory that an economic class rules politically.
^^^^^ CB: The term means that in its struggle and specifically conflicting interests with the ruled class, the working class, the ruling class dominates the actions of the state power ( which is not just the federal government, but all the lower levels of government down to city governments). The "autonomy" of the state is with respect to issues that are not particularly critical with respect to the antagonistic interests of the capitalist and working classes. The statutes against murder do not have much impact in favor of either of the antagonistic classes, so the state is autonomous of the ruling class with respect to that. Things like the U.S. Fifth Amendment on the right to own private property are central to the interests of the bourgeois ruling class, so the state is not at all autonomous of the ruling class with respect to that issue. That's a (the) fundamental structural state power issue. Less central but still structural are things like laws on labor organizing or strikes, which regulate the class struggle. The ruling class by and large dominates the state power on these laws, although as with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the working class won a battle. Notice that the ruling class soon struck back with the Taft-Hartley Act. That short-cut theory may or may not at times be true, but we do not want to carry that one rather simple theory about in the terms that we use to define our problems; we wish to state the theories explicitly, using terms of more precise and unilateral meaning. Specifically, the phrase 'ruling class,' in its common political connotations, does not allow enough autonomy to the political order and its agents, and it says nothing about the military as such. It should be clear to the reader by now that we do not accept as adequate the simple view that high economic men unilaterally make all decisions of national consequence. We hold that such a simple view of 'economic determinism' must be elaborated by 'political determinism' and 'military determinism'; that the higher agents of each of these three domains now often have a noticeable degree of autonomy; and that only in the often intricate ways of coalition do they make up and carry through the most important decisions. Those are the major reasons we prefer 'power elite' to 'ruling class' as a characterizing phrase for the higher circles when we consider them in terms of power.</blockquote> ^^^^^^ CB: Marxism doesn't necessarily deny that there is a power elite as Mills distinguishes it from ruling class. It is just that for Marxism the central issue is the class struggle. So, it is focussed on the contest between the capitalist class and the working class with respect to the state power ( federal through local). This is why the term "ruling" is used. Marxist analysis looks at what the state is doing with respect to the issues in contest between the capitalist class and the working class in their struggle over what are their irreconcilably antagonistic interests, and further how the capitalist class dominates the state in this respect. The state power's conduct with respect to issues that don't implicate this contest might be determined by a power elite, or even masses, not an elite. They might be determined substantially democratically. Traffic laws pretty much don't impact the class struggle one way or the other. So, they are determined by an expert "power elite", not elite committees representing the ruling class. The ruling class really doesn't have that much to do, because state power issues significantly impacting the class struggle do not come up for in contest very often. I'd say most of the activity of the state does not interest the ruling class, because it doesn't impact their class interests in their struggle and contest with the working class.
