American Oligarchy Part 1

After Reading Paul Starr's article "America on the Brink of Oligarchy", a review of three new books by American political scientists, and Timothy Noah's "What the Super-rich Really Want", I have a number of thoughts and reactions to share.

"Oligarchy", "Plutes", and "Plebes"- Fun with Words

The first thing that one may notice when reading through these two articles is the creative language that the authors have invented to deal with the question at hand.  What is this question anyway?  It is almost hard to tell, actually.  But, we know that it has something to do with money in politics, something to do with disparity and concentration of wealth, something to do with something that way back in the day we used to call "class".  I know the very term is a source of confusion, especially after reading these authors, but we shall expand on this and attempt to give a real working definition for class, first of all.

The words chosen- "oligarchy", "plebes", "plutes"- are all quite entertaining and evoke the most ancient imagery of tyranny and struggle.  Truly, only an academic could come up with such terms- both ironic and dramatic, all at once!  The problem, of course, is that such terms are all quite meaningless as the authors choose to define them.  Timothy Noah actually chooses to define the "plutes"  (shortened and laced with irony) as those whose income is $5 million or more a year, and the "plebes" as the general public, which we can suppose means everyone else.  A common argument thrown at the Marxist method of defining class is that it is "too rigid" and doesn't allow for differentiation between nations and societies (arguments made by those who, naturally, feel no need to actually read Marx).  Well, ladies and gentlemen, see for yourselves how completely arbitrary the bourgeois definition of  class is, how rigid:  the only thing actually separating one class from the other is a grand total of income! 

This simply will not do.  If we are to talk about class in a concrete way, then we must come up with a real definition based in the historical growth of society.  Income tells us very little about anything, about what one does for a living, and how they do it.  In fact, the classical tinge to the words these authors chose says a lot about how useless their definitions really are.  If income disparity were all we had to go off of, then not much really has changed between the Roman Republic and now!  One can simply deduce that there has always been a group of financial plutes and then sink comfortably into some crude maxim on human nature.  In fact, we do know that there were a few differences between Rome and America, but apparently our authors do not seem to think them particularly important when it comes to economy.  

Society has changed many times.  It's not true that there have always just been the haves and have-nots, the rulers and ruled.  Humanity spent the vast majority of its history in classless society of the hunter gatherers and the simple agrarian communities.  Classes, and disparity, only come onto the scene when the level of production is high enough to produce surplus, and hence for a group of people to live off the labor of others. So, the classes in past societies have always been tied to the means and mode of social production- and our Roman "plutes" were the owners of the productive property of slave society, the large slave estates.  Likewise, the American ruling class, the bourgeoisie, are the owners of the productive means of capitalism: the factories and industries connected with large scale production.  

Nor have their interests always been the same.  The SESA study aims to look at how the rich think NOW.  This is fine, but to truly understand the history of this class and the reasoning for its current movements (let's not tread down the crude path of pretending that they all think just alike, either, something the study did not show, and neither does history) one must look at the past of capitalism.  As happened with feudalism and Roman slave society, the bourgeoisie grew gradually within the bounds of  feudalism, which took the form of the contradiction between town and country, the feudal aristocracy and the burghers, the Church and the state.  The bourgeoisie represented the higher stage of production, and thus society generally, and undertook a heroic fight against the decrepit aristocracy- the Cromwell Dictatorship, the French Revolution, and the American Revolution were the events that this class led to crush the forces of the wretched past.  Similarly, the capitalists no longer care for equality and social change, but have become decrepit themselves as capitalism, too, rots on the vine and waits for the next, higher stage of production: socialism.   

Of course, we should still give the men who have undertaken the study under the guise of the SESA their due credit: as they mention, no one has yet undertaken a scientific study of what the rich want.  However, there is no need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.  HISTORY has in fact proven many times over what the rich want.  The financing of the White armies in Russia, the bloody reaction of the German Revolution, the cowardly maneuvering of the Republican bourgeoisie during the Spanish Revolution- these all illustrate, in the language of guns, steel, and blood what the rich want: to protect private property from the interests of the workers at all costs.

The Role of the State

Noah notes how the rich are in favor of more cuts in government spending, and Starr notes that the majority of groups represented in Washington are those of business.  This will not surprise anybody.  However, neither author touches on the role of the state itself.  It is not simply that “Because pressure politics relies so heavily on the services of paid professionals, it is a domain that facilitates the conversion of market resources into political advocacy” but that the state itself is an instrument of Capital.  There is a common idea that the state is a sort of body floating about society, and essentially a pure seat for anyone to sit.  This is untrue.  Just as society has changed, so has the state changed with the needs of the ruling class of an epoch;  the state of the Roman Republic could only serve the interests of maintaining slave society in the interests of the slave owners.  And similarly, the modern bourgeois democracy can only serve the interests of capitalism.  This was proven in practice by the experience of workers revolutions themselves.  In the famous example of the Paris Commune, the Parisian workers immediately set to changing the state as soon as they took hold of it.  The same was repeated in the Russian Revolution where the Soviets, the inventions of the workers themselves, proved to be the embryo of a new type of workers state.  

So, it is not merely a matter of getting "our" representatives in Washington, but a much larger process involving, first of all the lack of a political party even based in the working class in America, and the long-proven fact that even with a workers party at the helm of a capitalist state, their hands are bound by the laws of capitalism.  

In Part 2

-"adbusters", the internet, and tahrir square

- more on the state and voting

- austerity and elites, or "if you accept capitalism, you must accept its laws"