Welcome to the Oligarchy

By Lethbridge Herald on January 20, 2025.

TREVOR W. HARRISON  – 

ABC premiered a game show in 1999, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The title seems quaint today.

A report by Oxfam in early 2024 found that the world’s richest one per cent own 43 per cent of all global financial assets. The world’s five richest individuals – Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and family, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett – had a combined wealth of $869 billion, up from $405 billion in 2020, while the wealth of the world’s poorest 60 per cent fell.

Beyond any moral issues, there are several reasons to be concerned by growing wealth concentration.

First, extreme inequality acts as a brake on economic growth. The decades prior to the Great Recession of 2008-10 saw wealth sticking to the hands of America’s top one percent. It reached 29 per cent in 2007 – the same percentage as in 1929 when the Great Depression took hold. Concentrated wealth interferes with the virtuous cycle of production and consumption. Those without money are unable to buy, except on credit – its own poison pill – while those with money can’t spend or invest enough to grease the economy’s wheels. Building spaceships to Mars just doesn’t employ enough workers.

Second, the über rich always prioritize what is important to them and only incidentally what is important to society at large. They are attracted to profits only, and not such things as affordable housing, public education and health care, and social services. Even decent roads or functional airports get short shrift. The result is social breakdown as the things society needs for survival go begging.

Third, financial capital easily translates into political capital. Musk’s recent intrusions into American and European politics is a case in point. In the leadup to Donald Trump’s inauguration, Fortune 500 companies, crypto firms, and individual billionaires are reported to be providing seven-figure donations to the event in hopes of influencing policies that will further increase their wealth. Democracy cannot survive where the principle of one person, one vote becomes one dollar, one vote.

In fact, two Princeton political scientists several years ago concluded after examining the data that the U.S. is no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy. The oligarchic face of the United States then is now the face of the entire world. 

What is to be done?

There is no easy answer. In theory, our political leaders should act to protect society from the oligarchs. But they today often reflexively bow to the power of economic interests, afraid that the mere mention of higher taxes and meaningful regulations – or, heavens, such things as nationalization and public ownership – will lead to corporate attacks backed by political threats.   

Lacking effective action within the formal political system, we might expect the rise of popular social and political movements from below. But earlier movements – the Progressive Movement in the United States, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and Social Credit in Canada – were national in scope. The oligarchy today has gone global. Is it possible for a mass political movement to emerge on the international level? Possibly, but the prospects seem doubtful in the short term.

In the meantime, then, the more likely response to the crisis is what has been called the “politics of self” – individualized acts of self-harm (drug use, suicide) or the random and sporadic use of violence. None of these actions will address the problem’s deep roots. 

In the long run, the growth of inequality will reach its own dire conclusion, one marked by growing crises and chaos, for which the oligarchs will typically absolve themselves of responsibility. Change will come when the crisis reaches a breaking point; when the path out of it requires a rethinking of how we allowed a few actors to command the world’s wealth for their own ends. 

Trevor W. Harrison is a retired political sociologist at the University of Lethbridge and former director of the Parkland Institute