The ideological and political crisis of American bourgeois statehood has raised the question of the real viability and effectiveness of the US Constitution as its cornerstone. The intentions of the "founding fathers" of the United States and the content of the decisions of the Supreme Court have become the subject of widespread public debate. Marxists believe that in order to fully and correctly assess the constitutional phraseology and State practice of capitalist countries, it is necessary to study specifically their legal and political activities. The decisive role is played by the class struggle, the positions they have won, and the political and State-legal institutions created in this struggle. It is no accident that V. I. Lenin noted: "The essence of the constitution is that the basic laws of the state in general and the laws concerning the right to vote in representative institutions, their competence, etc., express the actual correlation of forces in the class struggle." 1 At the same time, the analysis of the constitution helps to better understand the vicissitudes of the class struggle in the bourgeois state. By expressing the will of the ruling class in the form of the supreme law of the country, the Constitution establishes its dictatorship and, consequently, has a class character. Most bourgeois scholars, as a rule, do not recognize the class character of the constitution. Speaking, for example, about the US Constitution, they often use the characteristic given to it by W. Gladstone: "The most democratic creation ever created by the mind and will of man"2 . However, from the very beginning of its existence, the US Constitution was also criticized. Contemporaries of the War of Independence, eighteenth-century politicians P. Henry and R. Lee described it as a" counter-revolutionary document "that violated the freedom and equality proclaimed in the" Declaration of Independence " of 1776. In 1854, the prominent American abolitionist W. Garrison declared th ... Read more