This comprehensive study of class struggle in America asks: Why has there never been a mass working class party in the United States?

"One of the most uncompromising books about American political economy ever written—brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched." —Village Voice

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class?

This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.