On the Romance of Capitalism and Oligarchy

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On the Romance of Capitalism and Oligarc

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INTRODUCTION

Much like there was once the spectre of Communism haunting Europe, a new spectre has crept into contemporary western politics, the spectre of Oligarchy. We live in a time where a fight for the preservation of democracy is a necessity; a challenge to a status quo that has for far too long been leading us down a treacherous slope into a world of calculated legislation produced to serve an increasingly limited minority occupying the top of society.

This all sounds rather dystopian, I hear you say, surely things haven’t reached such an apex yet? For some nations perhaps not, but for what is commonly regarded as the bastion of modern western democracy, namely the United States, that apex has long since been passed and, to be frank, this stage is not as far away for the rest of the world as perhaps we may care to admit.

Naturally with such a claim, the proof is in the pudding and the credence I shall give to the claim of American oligarchy is striking and, as the title of this piece suggests, highly derivative and consequential of the nature of unfettered free market capitalism. Indeed, the American testament that this very system has created their land of the free, the shining city on a hill, is (perhaps initially paradoxically) the very orchestrator of the oligarchy they now live in: a far cry from a model democracy, the United States is far better at limiting freedoms than creating them.

This isn’t a mere case of Capitalism being implemented poorly to generate such a state of affairs, rather (and quite worryingly) this is the state of affairs that perfectly implemented free market Capitalism will always tend to generate: Capitalism is not, and never has been, a friend of democracy.

Money talks, and money makes politics. Be it the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, money has always proved a far greater means of generating public policy than any landslide. Indeed, money has a way of producing constantly changing and worsening status quos for society, status quos that we are told are the only workable way to run society. However, it is worth seeing who it is making these arguments…

1 – An Obsession Grounded in Hypocrisy

We hear routinely of the US preoccupation with the spread of democratic ideals across the world: certainly, this is an ideal grounded in (without political muddiness) freedom of speech, a right to vote and a right to self-determination; indeed, ideals that many of us would welcome in their ubiquity.

The problem comes, however, when we note what is required for such a system and just how far America has strayed from even coming close to fulfilling these ideals even within their own country. Indeed, when we look at what a democracy is rooted in, namely: a free and fair media, the testament of one person one vote, and fair and open elections. Giving pause, examining each of these standards, I think it is fair to say that even a glancing observer would scoff at the notion that America is holding up to these self-set standards.

Rather, a far cry from a spreader of democratic ideals, we have a country that is lazily merely attempting to give the impression that it is fulfilling these standards while, simultaneously, over throwing other nations governments for their own interests. Lest we forget, additionally, that many of these foreign governments (in fact most) were brought about by the will of the people and democracy.

The US installation of Pinochet in Chile, a man occupied in military fascism rather than democracy, merely because the previous Socialist and democratically elected Chilean government was operating with US interests at heart gives extraordinary credence to the idea that the US is operating far more akin to an Imperialist Empire state than a democracy[1]. Truly, it’s not a good look as the supposed home of democracy to be overthrowing foreign democratic governments really, is it?

All of this is without even looking at the US domestic operations that themselves limit and block true democratic discourse at every possible turn: what we see when we go on and recognise this is that we have a state that operates with imperial objectives outside its borders and oligarchical objectives within its borders. You’d be forgiven here if you thought this was a description of Russia as opposed to the supposed leader of the free world, such is the careful and calculated manor in which the US conducts its propaganda machine.

2 – A Tale Of Monopoly and Money

The US makes no secret of the fact that it takes great pride in orchestrating a free market capitalist economy: it perceives the values created by such a system as not merely consistent with the notion of freedom but essential to it. However, whatever the justifications of operating such a system may be, it does not detract from the fact that in creating this element of perceived freedom, you highly compromise the unparalleled degree of freedom that a democracy can bring.

What I mean by this seemingly bold statement is that the inequality and monopoly generated by the US economic model is simply not compatible with a free and fair democratic model. For instance, let us examine the case of US news and media: who owns these means of this spread of information and is it as unbiased as it pultrudes to be?

Well when we look at the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News has become a de-facto propaganda wing of the Republican Party and the fact that numerous news network (local news included) can easily get financially conversed into running identical news stories on behalf of large corporations such as Amazon in order to boost the companies image, we have to conclude the US news isn’t a source of information but rather an outstandingly efficient source of misinformation: a means to oligarchy wearing the shoes of democracy[2].

Looking at this further, we can see the obvious impact this has on the democratic process: we recognise here the substantial effect media has on people, even if the media in question here isn’t even hiding the fact that it’s propagating an agenda of status-quo elite-favouring economics and a social conservatism designed (implicitly at best and explicitly at worse) to subvert the course of democracy. It’s a media machine that plays on peoples fears and exacerbates them further, giving themselves more credence to the extremist policy positions they advocate, after all if you tell a lie often enough it soon becomes the truth, and this shows at the ballot box. Thus, how can we truly say the electorate is getting any sort of truly informed decision? Take the 2020 US Presidential Election as an example of how this has propagated to absurd levels: on the one hand we have Donald Trump, a neo-fascist free market capitalist, and Joe Biden, a Conservative free market capitalist.

Certainly, there are notable differences between Biden and Trump (thank god) but the economic position of the two is near identical: what sort of democracy is this, where both candidates legislative positions are near identical? Much of this can be attributed to the bias within US media to the American brand of capitalism being repeatedly sold to the US population1: a very distant point from the free and fair media necessary to facilitate a truly free and fair democratic election. Of course, finance and monetary interests directly affecting politics is an even bigger issue in the States and something we shall now discuss.

Money has been directly involved in US Politics since antiquity; their political system has gladly enabled the unfettered spending and campaign donation system for generations and this is a very large factor in what has produced to near identical parties running against each other over and over again. We therefore have a system where in order to get any political power (with very few exceptions) you must first align with one of the two major parties and be open to accepting big dollar donations from large corporations who will want your ear should you get elected. The most despicable example of this monetary game is the US healthcare system: an insurance based private system where people will actively avoid going to hospital for serious conditions due to the costs and where basic medications (often free or very cheap elsewhere in the developed world) are sold at extortionate rates[3].

It isn’t even as if this is economically efficient to the US economy, on the contrary in fact. Single payer universal health care would cost far less, save far more lives and protect ordinary US citizens from the predatory prices of private health care and medications.

Why is it, then, that the US would persist with such a heinous policy choice? The answer is that the pharmaceutical companies will do anything to continue profiting off deaths, and so routinely pump politicians with ludicrous campaign donations in order for them to protect the system: should they fail to do so, they will get no such donations and consequently will almost never be able to thus win their next election: money wins elections and profit takes priority over lives, it’s that simple.

Here we have an explicit example of how US democracy allows for the strangling of certain policy decisions into favouring a wealthy minority while, in this case, killing the average member of the electorate: the people who actually vote.

This isn’t merely an outlier to corporate interest subverting the course of a free and open democratic process, rather the statistical data shows that the priority of an issue to the average voter has very little bearing on the outcome of legislative change or creation whereas, on the contrary, the priority of an issue to a large corporation in the pocket of a given politician as the inverse effect:

- figure 1[4]

In summary here, most US politicians seem to be most interested in those who can finance their electoral victories: they owe more to them than the voter, particularly in America where party politics is so partisan between the democrats and republicans, such that an average voter will merely vote for who they perceive as the lesser of two evils. In other words, the votes were perceived as in the bag anyway for the given politician. When you have a system such as this, the average voter has near zero impact on shaping public policy. Rather, that power lies with the puppet masters of their elected representative, namely those financers with the deep pockets. Thus, policy is generated in line with the interests of the wealthy business community at heart, directly opposing public interest as stated above and as is visible in figure 1.

It's worth noting here that this is the most explicit example of what I’m getting at in the title of this piece: Capitalism isn’t merely a friend to oligarchy, it is a necessity to it in contemporary politics.

3 – A Shining Mirage on a Hill

Given all the aforementioned points above, it seems that policy is almost cut and dry before any elected official gets into office in the US, irrespective of the party they choose to represent. What, then, is the purpose in such rigorous campaigning? If a running politician knows little will change by means of the democratic process and that their role will merely be a facilitator in maintaining the status-quo, then why even bother having an election?

The answer here is twofold, both rather obvious when one thinks about it. Firstly, different factions of the wealthy corporate communities have different interests and thus will effectively buy politicians on either side to oppose each other, thus generating an electoral battle on the grounds of capitalist idealism. This first prerequisite handily allows for the second reason to be fulfilled: if the US wants to continue to be looked to as a leader and shining light of the free democratic world, it must keep the image of the shining city on a hill firmly in peoples minds and allow them to feel that the people are part of a meaningful process and vehicle for change.

Okay, that’s all well and good but wouldn’t the electorate just vote out a politician that isn’t helping them? Afterall, they still have their right to vote them out by popular majority. The answer here is yes, of course they can, but good luck to them as we encounter another means by which the legislators can disrupt the course of democracy: gerrymandering.

In a standard democratic process, then voters pick the politician; this is an obvious corner stone of what a democracy should be about. Now, in any system where constituencies or regions are used to select the representative of that region we have the potential for serious problems and this isn’t merely limited to the US (although it is most strikingly clear).

Whenever there is the potential for the boundary lines to be redrawn, we have the potential for incredibly lopsided election results and clear and obvious vote stacking. Let’s look at some examples of how this works in figure 2 and figure 3:

- figure 2[5]

- figure 3[6]

Here we see the absurdity by which district lines can be and, indeed, are drawn to steal any given election. In this regard, it doesn’t matter who wins the popular vote overall, votes will be stacked and drawn along these lines to protect a party or politician: the days of the voter picking the politician here are all but over for gerrymandered districts, the politician gets to pick the voter. This is not democratic.

We also find another issue here, particularly in the US, where districts will be drawn along racial lines, limiting the impact of the minority vote. This gives us a clear connecting factor between the network of protecting capitalist interests and race discrimination.

For instance, let us take the state of Wisconsin as a good practical example of this. Figure 4 shows the areas of Wisconsin with a majority of minority voters and what we find is a dilution of Democratic voting power. But it also places thousands of African-American and Latino citizens in a heavily white district where they have little hope of electing a candidate who will represent their interests(7).

- figure 4[7]

Gerrymandering is merely one active example of how the voting process itself can be rigged. For example, we are also seeing an increasingly prevalent case of regressive voter ID laws being introduced in the US and globally[8].

Such laws naturally have a disproportionate effect on poorer communities who often times have no legitimate form of ID due to financial predispositions or otherwise5. This of course further limits voter turnout and thus even further confines the impact the average citizen has on any meaningful change: if the average citizen has no means to vote, how can we claim to have a free and open democratic process5.

In summary here, we now recognise that not merely is voter impact restricted by corporate interests explicitly, but we have an implicit ripple effect that worryingly has lead us down a path where a citizens ability to vote is itself now being restricted. Thus, we find ourselves a system that does not merely not allow meaningful electoral challenge to the status-quo, but actively works against any possible means of doing so, right up to the ballot box.

4 – Conclusion

What are we to take from all of this? I think it has to be clear to us all now that no western nation has as pure a democratic process as we may care to admit. The US here is an example of just how bad things can be allowed to get when unfettered free market capitalism holds all the dice but, lest we forget, all western nations operate such a system to varying extents and so are all susceptible to such challenges to the democratic process.

The clear and obvious point I want to be taken here is this: democracy is not compatible with capitalism, only oligarchy and authoritarianism is compatible with capitalism.

Bibliography

1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/world/americas/chile-coup-cia-museum.html - Pascale Bonnefoy

2 - https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18275835/fox-news-trump-propaganda-tom-rosenstiel - How Fox News evolved into a propaganda operation

3 - https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2019/08/30/473911/big-pharma-reaps-profits-hurting-everyday-americans/ - By Abbey Meller and Hauwa Ahmed

4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpwJKYbEAZ8 – Second Thought

5 - https://www.fairvote.org/new_poll_everybody_hates_gerrymandering - New poll: Everybody hates gerrymandering – FairVote

6 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fnews%2fwonk%2fwp%2f2014%2f05%2f15%2famericas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts%2f – Washington Post

7 - https://www.propublica.org/article/partisan-gerrymandering-is-still-about-race - ‘Partisan’ Gerrymandering Is Still About Race, ProPublica

8 - https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet - ACL

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/world/americas/chile-coup-cia-museum.html - Pascale Bonnefoy [2] https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18275835/fox-news-trump-propaganda-tom-rosenstiel - How Fox News evolved into a propaganda operation [3] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2019/08/30/473911/big-pharma-reaps-profits-hurting-everyday-americans/ - By Abbey Meller and Hauwa Ahmed [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpwJKYbEAZ8 – Second Thought [5] https://www.fairvote.org/new_poll_everybody_hates_gerrymandering - New poll: Everybody hates gerrymandering - FairVote [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fnews%2fwonk%2fwp%2f2014%2f05%2f15%2famericas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts%2f – Washington Post [7] https://www.propublica.org/article/partisan-gerrymandering-is-still-about-race - ‘Partisan’ Gerrymandering Is Still About Race, ProPublica [8] https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet - ACLU