Oligarchy

Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos) 'few', and ἄρχω (arkho) 'to rule or to command')[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. These people may be distinguished by nobility, wealth, education, corporate, religious, political, or military control. Such states are often controlled by families who pass their influence from one generation to the next, but inheritance is not a necessary condition of oligarchy.

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Throughout history, oligarchies have often been tyrannical, relying on public obedience or oppression to exist. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as meaning rule by the rich,[4] for which another term commonly used today is plutocracy. In the early 20th century Robert Michels developed the theory that democracies, as all large organizations, have a tendency to turn into oligarchies. In his "Iron law of oligarchy" he suggests that the necessary division of labor in large organizations leads to the establishment of a ruling class mostly concerned with protecting their own power.

This was already recognized by the Athenians in the fourth century BCE: after the restoration of democracy from oligarchical coups, they used the drawing of lots for selecting government officers to counteract that tendency toward oligarchy in government.[5] They drew lots from large groups of adult volunteers to pick civil servants performing judicial, executive, and administrative functions (archai, boulē, and hēliastai).[6] They even used lots for posts, such as judges and jurors in the political courts (nomothetai), which had the power to overrule the Assembly.[7]

Minority rule
Main article: Minoritarianism

The exclusive consolidation of power by a dominant religious or ethnic minority has also been described as a form of oligarchy.[8] Examples of this system include South Africa under apartheid, Liberia under Americo-Liberians, the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and Rhodesia, where the installation of oligarchic rule by the descendants of foreign settlers was primarily regarded as a legacy of various forms of colonialism.[8]

The modern United States has also been described as an oligarchy because economic elites and organized groups representing special interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.[9]

Putative oligarchies

A business group might be defined as an oligarchy if it satisfies all of the following conditions:

  • Owners are the largest private owners in the country.
  • It possesses sufficient political power to promote its own interests.
  • Owners control multiple businesses, which intensively coordinate their activities.[10]

Intellectual oligarchies

The Nobel Prize in Literature winner George Bernard Shaw defined in his play Major Barbara, premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907, a new type of Oligarchy namely the intellectual oligarchy that acts against the interests of the common people: “I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man. I love the common people. I want to arm them against the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals, and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.” [11]

Cases perceived as oligarchies

Russian Federation
Main article: Russian oligarch

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and privatization of the economy in December 1991, privately owned Russia-based multinational corporations, including producers of petroleum, natural gas, and metal have, in the view of many analysts, led to the rise of Russian oligarchs.[12] Most of these are connected directly to the highest-ranked government officials, such as President.

Ukraine
Main article: Ukrainian oligarchs

The Ukrainian oligarchs are a group of business oligarchs that quickly appeared on the economic and political scene of Ukraine after its independence in 1991. Overall there are 35 oligarchic groups. [10]

United States
Further information: Wealth inequality in the United States, Income inequality in the United States § Democracy and society, Politics of the United States § Concerns about oligarchy, and Campaign finance in the United States
"The Bosses of the Senate", corporate interests as giant money bags looming over senators.[13]

Some contemporary authors have characterized current conditions in the United States as oligarchic in nature.[14][15] Simon Johnson wrote that "the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent", a structure which he delineated as being the "most advanced" in the world.[16] Jeffrey A. Winters wrote that "oligarchy and democracy operate within a single system, and American politics is a daily display of their interplay."[17] The top 1% of the U.S. population by wealth in 2007 had a larger share of total income than at any time since 1928.[18] In 2011, according to PolitiFact and others, the top 400 wealthiest Americans "have more wealth than half of all Americans combined."[19][20][21][22]

In 1998, Bob Herbert of The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as "The Donor Class"[23][24] (list of top donors)[25] and defined the class, for the first time,[26] as "a tiny group—just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population—and it is not representative of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access."[23]

French economist Thomas Piketty states in his 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that "the risk of a drift towards oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed."[27]

A 2014 study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University stated that "majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts." The study analyzed nearly 1,800 policies enacted by the US government between 1981 and 2002 and compared them to the expressed preferences of the American public as opposed to wealthy Americans and large special interest groups.[28] It found that wealthy individuals and organizations representing business interests have substantial political influence, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little to none. The study did concede that "Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise." Gilens and Page do not characterize the US as an "oligarchy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey Winters with respect to the US. Winters has posited a comparative theory of "oligarchy" in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a "civil oligarchy" like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection.[29]

Gilens says that average citizens only get what they want if wealthy Americans and business-oriented interest groups also want it; and that when a policy favored by the majority of the American public is implemented, it is usually because the economic elites did not oppose it.[30] Other studies have questioned the Page and Gilens study.[31][32][33]

In a 2015 interview, former President Jimmy Carter stated that the United States is now "an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery" due to the Citizens United v. FEC ruling which effectively removed limits on donations to political candidates.[34] Wall Street spent a record $2 billion trying to influence the 2016 United States presidential election.[35][36]

See also

References
  1. "ὀλίγος", Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  2. "ἄρχω", Liddell/Scott.
  3. "ὀλιγαρχία". Liddell/Scott.
  4. Winters (2011) p. 26-28. "Aristotle writes that 'oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands... wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy'."
  5. Hansen, Mogens Herman (1991). The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631180173. OCLC 22809482
  6. Bernard Manin. Principles of Representative Government. pp. 11–24 (1997).
  7. Manin (1997), pp. 19–23.
  8. Coleman, James; Rosberg, Carl (1966). Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa. Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 681–683. ISBN 978-0520002531.
  9. Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
  10. Chernenko, Demid (2018). "Capital structure and oligarch ownership" (PDF). Economic Change and Restructuring. 52 (4): 383–411. doi:10.1007/S10644-018-9226-9. S2CID 56232563.
  11. Shaw, Bernard und Baziyan, Vitaly. 2-in-1: English-German. Major Barbara & Majorin Barbara. New York, 2020, ISBN 979-8692881076
  12. Scheidel, Walter (2017). The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press. pp. 51 & 222–223. ISBN 978-0691165028.
  13. Joseph Keppler, Puck (January 23, 1889)
  14. Kroll, Andy (2 December 2010). "The New American Oligarchy". TomDispatch. Truthout. Archived from the original on 22 January 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
  15. "America on the Brink of Oligarchy". The New Republic. 24 August 2012.
  16. Johnson, Simon (May 2009). "The Quiet Coup". The Atlantic. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
  17. Winters, Jeffrey A. (November–December 2011) [28 September 2011]. "Oligarchy and Democracy". The American Interest. 7 (2). Retrieved 17 August 2012.
  18. "Tax Data Show Richest 1 Percent Took a Hit in 2008, But Income Remained Highly Concentrated at the Top. Recent Gains of Bottom 90 Percent Wiped Out". Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 25 May 2011. Retrieved 30 May 2014.
  19. Kertscher, Tom; Borowski, Greg (10 March 2011). "The Truth-O-Meter Says: True – Michael Moore says 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined". PolitiFact. Retrieved 11 August 2013.
  20. Moore, Michael (6 March 2011). "America Is Not Broke". Huffington Post. Retrieved 11 August 2013.
  21. Moore, Michael (7 March 2011). "The Forbes 400 vs. Everybody Else". michaelmoore.com. Archived from the original on 9 March 2011. Retrieved 28 August 2014.
  22. Pepitone, Julianne (22 September 2010). "Forbes 400: The super-rich get richer". CNN. Retrieved 11 August 2013.
  23. Herbert, Bob (19 July 1998). "The Donor Class". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  24. Confessore, Nicholas; Cohen, Sarah; Yourish, Karen (10 October 2015). "The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  25. Lichtblau, Eric; Confessore, Nicholas (10 October 2015). "From Fracking to Finance, a Torrent of Campaign Cash – Top Donors List". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
  26. McCutcheon, Chuck (26 December 2014). "Why the 'donor class' matters, especially in the GOP presidential scrum". "The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  27. Piketty, Thomas (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press. ISBN 067443000X p. 514
  28. "Major Study Finds The US Is An Oligarchy". businessinsider.com.
  29. Gilens & Page (2014) p. 6
  30. Prokop, A. (18 April 2014) "The new study about oligarchy that's blowing up the Internet, explained" Vox
  31. Bashir, Omar S. (1 October 2015). "Testing Inferences about American Politics: A Review of the "Oligarchy" Result". Research & Politics. 2 (4): 2053168015608896. doi:10.1177/2053168015608896. ISSN 2053-1680.
  32. Enns, Peter K. (1 December 2015). "Relative Policy Support and Coincidental Representation". Perspectives on Politics. 13 (4): 1053–1064. doi:10.1017/S1537592715002315. ISSN 1541-0986.
  33. Enns, Peter K. (1 December 2015). "Reconsidering the Middle: A Reply to Martin Gilens". Perspectives on Politics. 13 (4): 1072–1074. doi:10.1017/S1537592715002339. ISSN 1541-0986. S2CID 148467972.
  34. Kreps, Daniel (31 July 2015). "Jimmy Carter: U.S. Is an 'Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery'". Rolling Stone.
  35. "Wall Street spends record $2bn on US election lobbying". Financial Times. 8 March 2017.
  36. "Wall Street Spent $2 Billion Trying to Influence the 2016 Election". Fortune. 8 March 2017.

Further reading
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