Today in the West, oligarchy seems like a distant myth. The oligarchs… are Russian. “In a seminar at Northwestern University, one of my students on the first day of the course said: ‘Russia has oligarchs, the US has rich people.’ For many people in the West, an oligarch is someone who gets rich corruptly. If you get rich in a way that is considered acceptable, you are called a ‘billionaire’ or a ‘megadonor’ in a political campaign, as if you are using your money as a donation, not as power. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are oligarchs. There is no doubt,” reflects Jeffrey A. Winters, who publishes Oligarquía (Arpa), a book that covers the power and domination exercised by the richest people from ancient times to the present day. From Sumeria to the ruling oligarchies of Athens, Rome, Venice or Siena and reaching the civil oligarchy of the USA of the last century.
“It is very dangerous to be rich, especially when others don’t have much. So the political problem that the rich always face is how to prevent their wealth from being taken away from them. “Throughout most of history, the number one threat to oligarchs has always come from other oligarchs, but there is also a danger of redistribution from below, from the people, and already with the modern State, from above,” he summarizes. . But despite our democracies, he says, “today is the best time in history to be an oligarch.”
In fact, the numbers are resounding. “The last decades of the 20th century are a period of intensification of hyperwealth. Let’s compare modern liberal democracies and Rome, with its Senate, its small farmers and many slaves. What is the gap between Rome’s top senators and today’s top oligarchs in the US? If you take the wealth of the average person in Rome and compare it to that of the senators, they are 10,000 times richer. In the US today, the ratio is 100,000 to one. “This is unprecedented in history.”
The explanations are multiple. “In the past, an oligarch, in order to defend his wealth, usually had to be armed and rule directly. Who was going to defend his wealth for them? Nobody. Today, if Elon Musk’s money doubles from 100 billion to 200 billion, he doesn’t have to spend it on a militia. “The State defends property.” Added to that is what Winters calls “the wealth defense industry, a multibillion-dollar global industry of accountants, lawyers and lobbyists whose full-time job is wealth defense for Gates or Zuckerberg, who employ the defense industry.” of wealth to ensure that redistribution is not possible.”
And, he smiles, “the wealth defense industry also exists for Scandinavian oligarchs. The welfare state in Sweden or Finland is quite extensive. What people don’t realize is that it is financed by regressive taxes on the non-rich. The percentage of the population that owns the majority of the stock market in Sweden is lower than in the U.S. No country successfully chases oligarchs’ money.”
And it seems paradoxical to him that we live “in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth after 250 years of the modern democratic era. We do not tend towards greater equality, in fact we see the opposite. And the greatest concentration occurs in the most liberal democracies. That tells us that our democracies are somewhat limited. “We live in systems that are a mixture of oligarchy and democracy.” Systems in which, he warns, “the visibility of oligarchs and their participation in politics is at a historically high level, with very negative consequences. There is a decline in trust in democratic institutions. Increasingly, individuals and corporations are the source of financing for increasingly expensive campaigns. And those donations limit the range of who the candidates are.”
And the concentration of wealth and inequality are not without consequences. “We have an increasingly precarious life for people, not only for the poor, but also for the middle class. People leave home later. He gets married later. All over the world. That creates a situation for extremists. Those who feel precarious ask themselves: Who should I hate? Who should I blame? And politicians like Trump provide answers.”
