Oligarchy & Modern Megainstitutions
Today, all governments, even putative democracies, are oligarchies just as a matter of course; they must be within a global order of extreme gigantism, under which each of a relatively small number of national governments rules over a large group of people—often tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or billions. The inevitable corollary of the absurd largeness we find all around us is the rule of the few, for as government bodies grow larger, it becomes ever more impractical for citizens (read: subjects) to actively, meaningfully participate in the associated processes. Thus, for the sociologist Robert Michels, large-scale organization necessarily meant oligarchy, with hierarchical bureaucracies allocating power to a small officialdom. This, argued Michels, must be so regardless of the ideological commitments of the organization’s members. If Michels was right, then one of humanity’s best safeguards against oligarchy is to keep our organizations small—small in terms of the number of people subsumed, the geographical area embraced, and the scope of activities undertaken. Kirkpatrick Sale offers the following summary of the importance of smallness:
Nothing should be decided at any level beyond that where the people effected [sic] get to have their say and participate in carrying it out. Following from that, as a next point of agreement, is that the community is the most important human institution in the life of the species—the small, place-based community, where each member is known to every other. It is primarily there that power should reside—social, economic, political, whatever.
Alienation and isolation are the predictable results of this strange dichotomy of the modern world, dividing the life of the individual between immense megainstitutions and private life.1 The rise of these megainstitutions coincides with the extinction of the “mediating structures”2 (among them, the family, religious organizations, fraternal societies, and other voluntary clubs and civic associations), leaving society without a robust bulwark against the steady encroachment of lifeless, pulverizing bureaucracy. Democracy is debased, reduced to hollow ritual (it feels good to show off your “I voted” sticker!). It is little wonder that scores of millions of eligible voters opt to sit elections out, tacitly aware that voting actually doesn’t do anything of importance, unable to touch the ideological substrates of the system themselves. It is not so much that the disagreements between the Republican and Democratic halves of the power elite aren’t sincere, but that they are confined to an extremely small space of acceptable opinion. Politics is about empty sloganeering and silly culture war posturing precisely rather than facing the underlying causes of today’s problems. As Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon explain in their book Downsizing the U.S.A.,
The problems of the poor, the underprivileged, and the disenfranchised are not amenable to solutions imposed from above. Solutions require the bottom-up participation of those affected, as well as a sense of community that connects those who have been victimized with those in a position to influence the results.
While the development of empirical measures of oligarchy is a fraught undertaking3, various measures of material power suggest that rich Americans have an outsized influence on political outcomes. In his 2011 book Oligarchy, Jeffrey A. Winters defines oligarchy in terms of the process through which oligarchs defend “extreme material stratification.” The oligarch is defined as one controlling concentrated wealth, which he exerts in the defense of his “personal wealth and exclusive social position.”
Students of public choice theory are familiar with Mancur Olson’s explanation of why the few frequently defeat the many within the realm of public policy; pressure groups are well-positioned to mobilize resources and direct lobbying efforts toward specific policy measures that benefit them narrowly, while the costs of such policies are diffuse, thus going unnoticed by the populace at large. The cumulative effects of such advocacy efforts create a political and economic environment that favors oligarchical interests, embedded in the halls of power. As Adam Smith famously explains, powerful business concerns, forever “engaged in plans and projects,” “have frequently more acuteness of understanding” of their own interests than the rest of us have of ours. In the world of power and politics, they can outwit great majorities with relative ease.
The attentive can observe the results. Consider the extent to which today’s great fortunes depend on intellectual property privileges, which amount to the purely religious notion that human beings can legitimately hold ownership rights over ideas, unbodied things. And there’s no shortage of other tools elites use to shape political economy in their favor: professional licensure and arbitrary credentialing more generally, corporate limited liability, the fraudulent manipulation of monies, the theft of valuable land and natural resources, the wanton rape and destruction of the global commons, the violent preclusion of alternatives (such as simply opting out of the capitalist consumer system and going off the grid), regulatory and tax barriers to entry, and so on. It is preposterous even to call them “interventions,” as if to imply that free markets are still somehow the starting point, the baseline, or the norm. Taken together, they create a system so deeply unlike the libertarian ideal of a free market that the identification of the term capitalism with that ideal appears absurd, genuine freedom being only a very rare exception.
The aggregate impact of these violations of human dignity and autonomy is extreme centralization and consolidation, with individuals increasingly unmoored and defined as identification numbers in the ranks of large institutions. No amount of political participation, in the conventional sense, can meaningfully change our oligarchy or our megainstitutions, for the political process is among the social institutions over which elites have the tightest grip. Indeed, we must become less dependent on mainstream politics, candidates, and elections, organizing local, community-based mutual aid societies and preparing ourselves for the next crisis.
Charles K. Wilber, Peacemaking: Moral and Policy Challenges for a New World, page 141.
Ibid.
As Dieter Rucht noted over twenty years ago, “Robert Michels's iron law of oligarchy has rarely been submitted to rigorous empirical investigation.” Given the complexity of the relationship between politics and economics and the number of confounding factors, it is extremely difficult to draw exact conclusions about the causal mechanisms at play. Much easier to see are the privileges created by politico-economic elites and the fact that the most decisive ones are insulated from change by mere subjects.