There is, of course, a Capitalist Class, but like the Working Class, that is a structural feature of capitalism. In a feudal system ("system" is not quite the right word in respect to feudalism) to say that X belongs to a certain status (there are no classes in feudalism), a certain "estate," allows one to say a good deal abut that particular individual. It constitutes (in modern slang), an identity. But to call a person a capitalist or a worker says _nothing_ whatever about that person except that he or she lives in a capitalist state. Quite a few workers have higher incomes than quite a few capitalists, and live a 'richer' lifestyle. (This accounts for the difficulty in any capitalist society of answering in any satisfactory way the question, "Who are you?" or "Who am I?" For Socrates and Plato that question was easy. "Self-Knowledge" means "Knowing one's Place" ( that is, locating oneself in a given "estate" or "caste." (See Tamás for a discussion of the difference between a "class" and an estate, caste, or status.)
Moreover, except for extraordinary periods, the major decisions in a capitalist society are not made by the government but by corporations and individual small capitalists. (That is, to focus on "the ruling class" in terms of state decisions is a barrier to analyzing "How the Ruling Class Rules.") When the owner of a small cleaning business, with say 5 employees, says to a job applicant, "You're hired" or "Sorry, we don't have an opening just now," THAT is the ruling class in action. For the job applicant that decision is far more important than anything the federal, state, or local government might do. Moving up the scale a bit, a quality engineer in a transmission factory puts a red tag on a gearshaving machine. It's not to be used until a machine repair man adjusts it. Then a foreman comes along and sort of twitches his head, and the operative goes back to putting gears through that red-taaag machine. (Accoding to the job setter all that would do was perhaps cause a slight hum in the transmission of some Cadillac. The same thing I operation in another context: an engineer says those O rings are not safe. Another engineer says, welll, yes, but nothing is apt to happen. And da number of people die.
Who made these decisions? (Possibly a linked situation: When Eisenhower called on Truman after his election, Truman told him: You sit behind this desk and say, "Do this" or "Do that." And nothing happens.) Most leftists and liberals during the Bush Administration seemed to answer this kind of question blithely, "Bush did it." "Bush is stupid." Or they said, "The Neocons did it." (More complicated than this, but I think these comments are a fair oversimplification: they catch the essence. Even dogmatic Marxists simply cannot get rid of the superstition that "Someone is to Blame."
Perhaps I've touched on here the reasoning that Rosa Luxemburg went through from 1914 to 1916 as she wrestled with "Who is to blame for this -- perhaps the worst single event in human history?" Is my old friend Karl K to blame?" The Kaiser? The Austrian "Ruling Class?" The German General Staff? And perhaps she reached the conclusion, "No one is to blame." That is, she began to see a material link between the foreman twisting his head at a red tag and a holocaust killing millions. But if no one is to blame, if nothing will happen by getting these that man rather than this man as foreman, then we live in a world that has no meaning, at least no meaning in the terms in which I and my comrades have been thinking for the last three decades. History has no meaning: There is No Progress structured into it. Whatever meaning it has or might have must be deliberately created by humans acting together. But I've just seen that here and now humans cannot act together in any deliberate way. So before we can act together to give meaning to our history, we have to act together to create a world in which it is possible to act together. Otherwise this barbarism in which we live now will continue indefinitely. "Socialism or Barbarism" does not refer to the future; it refers to the present, as would "Go out the door or burn to death" spoken by a man standing in the middle of a burning building." She did not Predict that Barbarism would come if we did not create socialism; she said the only way to escape from the barbarism which has arrived is to build socialism.
So the Ruling Class does not make decisions. No one rules. (That is the burden of Truman's observation to Eisenhower. Though Truman obviously didn't really understand what he was saying.) To say that "The Ruling Class" has decided confuse class (a structural feature of capitalism) with (say) the Noble Estate of medieval France.
We need a concrete critique, which cannot have the force of Marx's critique of an abstract ("ideal average) of capitalism but must operate within that context and within Luxemburg's perception that there is no meaning to hisotyr.
How? Not in general -- that would be a disguised way of claiming to have a crystal ball, but under "things as they are," which means to see the present as history, which requires us to look back on the present from a hypothetical future perspective, while recognizing that there is no direct 'route' from here to there. One step at a time is a formula for barbarism.
Carrol