>>487689>It's a Marxist term.Are we talking Marx here or one of the clowns in Germany who came after him and disregarded half the shit he wrote? Regardless, the Orwellian rot had already set in in the middle of the 19th century by the time Marx started writing. Aspiring aristocrats from the American and French revolutions had already taken the word "democracy" and inverted the stable meaning it had had for two millennia to reflect its historic rival and nemesis.
>1. That's just oligarchy.The distinction actually does mean something. Oligarchies of the past were ruled by slave-holding elites or feudal lords. As Cockshott notes in the above video, in oligarchies like Rome and Sparta the politics were generally a contest between one set of slave-holding elites versus another set of slave-holding elites. In democracies like Athens and Argos, however, the political battles actually occurred between the free citizens and the slave-holding elites. Bourgeois oligarchy is rule by the new class of elites which replaced the latter.
Although frankly in a highly financialized post-industrial economy like the United States, we don't even have a bourgeois oligarchy. Instead we have an oligarchy dominated by the financial rentier class which has usurped control from the industrial bourgeois class.