Abstract
In this timely addition to the scholarship on inequality in America and the durability of worshipping free-market capitalism and private property above all else (Friedman, 2020 [1962]), Robert Ovetz takes us back to the very founding of the United States and the consequential drafting of the Constitution in arguing that the very essence of our representative democracy was to preserve dominant rule for a small handful of power elites and to prevent the emergence of political and economic democracy to the detriment of the vast majority of American society. More specifically, Ovetz (2022: 5) maintains that at ‘every step in our constitutional system, the vast majority of people are forced to obtain the consent of the elite to their demands, or see their concerns go unheeded and their interests unmet’. This is intentionally so because, as Ovetz finely argues over the course of 10 chapters, the Framers embedded a series of ‘checks and balances’ throughout the Constitution which enables the minority, financial elite to block most every attempt to reform our society for the economic benefit of the majority. Most glaringly, the electoral college itself is a ‘manifestation of the strategy of divide and conquer’ (Ovetz 2022: 102). While primarily a critical, historical account and analysis of the Constitution, in many ways We the Elites should be regarded as a companion piece to contemporary scholarship on forms of exploitation under financialized neoliberalism (Di Muzio and Robbins 2016; Lazzarato 2013; Soederberg 2014); that is, by understanding how and in what ways our ‘democratic’ Constitution enables financial institutions and political elites to zap our existence through interest-baring capital in the preservation of late-capitalism. With his rich historical exegesis centering on constitutional provisions, Ovetz provides the explanatory scaffolding for perhaps why we live today in an era in what Mark Fisher (2009: 2) describes as ‘capitalist realism’.
In Chapter 1, Ovetz introduces the reader to the fundamental, underlying problem with our current constitutional system, namely, our Founding Fathers’ distrust and detestation of the majoritarian ‘rabble’ who if not placed in significant check could one day rise up and wrest the accumulation of private property from their elite hands (obtained of course through the extensions of exploitative credit to local farmers, the institution of slavery, and the primitive accumulation of land from native peoples) and move the capitalist economy to truly democratic control. Moving from this underlying background – as exemplified by the Federalist Papers – in Chapters 2 through 8 Ovetz systematically and carefully breaks down both the preamble to the Constitution and the various statutory provisions contained in Articles I, II, and III in demonstrating how our constitutional provisions are constructed to congeal power for the economic elite and to prevent any threat of economic democracy by the majority. Chapter 2 unpacks how the centralized powers granted to Congress to (among others): tax; spend; regulate interstate commerce; and pay debts resulted in economic power being concentrated in the federal government and away from the independent states. Chapter 3, 4, and 5 dissect how Article I of the Constitution was designed to create inefficiencies in the operation of Congress, particularly due to its fragmentation between two houses which creates a ‘gauntlet of minority checks’ (p. 84) that can overcome the desires of the majority. Chapters 6 and 7 focus their attention on Article II and the executive branch. In sum, Ovetz demonstrates how the various powers given to the president – for example, creating binding regulations through administrative agencies, the executive veto, and the ability to call up the military in both foreign and domestic affairs – were intended to serve as yet another check on the other two branches of government. In Chapter 8, Ovetz takes aim at the judicial branch and its ability to ‘constrain and impede the will of the majority’ (p. 128). Ovetz argues that the judicial branch has historically shielded property and the macroeconomic operations of capitalism, most notably through the Lochner era in the first 50 years of the twentieth century. The salience of this observation cannot be overstated as the current makeup of the United States Supreme Court and its recent spate of decisions reinforces Ovetz’s astute observations.
In Chapter 10, Ovetz offers his potential prescriptions for unwinding our class-based Constitution and its blanket protection of the capitalist economic system. Ovetz settles on the sobering observation that we are at a constitutional dead end with no true possibility of meaningful reform under its command. Instead, Ovetz argues that we need to sever private property from its constitutional moorings and to reject our system of representative democracy, “not to replace it with another system of rule but to organize society for direct democratic self-rule and a shared commons protected in trust for all” (p. 167). That is, we must move beyond our Constitution for it only represents a “top-down instrument for imposing the rule of elites in the form of the state” (p. 168). This solution offered by Ovetz is essentially one that directly harkens back to Engels and Marx (2002 [1872]) for Ovetz envisions that during the next global economic crisis, “workers at global choke points” should effectively “shut down, take over, and democratically run the operations (p. 170) for our collective benefit. On this note, if there is any limitation to We the Elites it is with Ovetz’s ultimate solution. Given the long-standing criticisms of Marx’s economic determinism in Capital Volume I, Ovetz could have added some complexity and nuance to his prescription for a workers’ takeover of the American capitalist state. For example, significant questions remain unanswered. Manufacturing plants and all other workplace sites ironically need a constant infusion of capital to operate, so how will the workers come up with the necessary capital flows to continue operations and, perhaps most importantly, pay the companies’ creditors to avert involuntarily shutdowns? How can the newly established local assemblies in these spaces of worker employment coordinate themselves successfully in a diffuse and diverse nation with more than 350 million people? Further, Ovetz unfortunately does not address the close synergy between the role of money/campaign contributions that serves to reproduce the governmental system that he so correctly criticizes.
But despite these quibbles regarding the final chapter, overall, We the Elites is an important work to consider and to learn from as we continue meandering through the unequal trappings of late capitalism. The audience for this work is potentially substantial and cuts across both layperson and academic audiences. More specifically for me, this book can and should be assigned to undergraduates in political science courses, soon-to-be law students who will benefit from a critical perspective on our constitutional system before their first-year constitutional law courses, and current law students in the rising number of legal classes that do incorporate critically historical and sociological approaches to our understandings of the American legal system.