Theme: Oligarchy

Theme Explorations

What is Oligarchy?

• "Oligarchs are distinct from all other empowered minorities because the basis of their power -- material wealth -- is unusually resistant to dispersion and equalization. It is not just that it is difficult to disperse the material power of oligarchs. It is that massive personal wealth is an extreme form of social and political power imbalance that, despite significant advances in recent centuries on other fronts of injustice, has managed since antiquity to remain ideologically constructed as unjust to correct." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 4). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "Across dictatorships, democracies, monarchies, peasant societies, and post-industrial formations, the notion that it is wrong to enforce radical redistribution of wealth is remarkably durable." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 4). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "Oligarchs are actors who command and control massive concentrations of resources that can be deployed to defend or enhance their personal wealth and exclusive social position." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 6). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "Oligarchy refers to the politcs of wealth defense by materially endowed actors." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 6). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]

Oligarchy & Inequality

• "Extreme material stratification in society generates social conflict. Highly unequal distributions of wealth are impossible without a firmament of enforcement, which means property claims and rights can never be separated from coercion and violence." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 7). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "It follows that oligarchs and oligarchy will cease to exist not through democratic procedures, but rather when extremely unequal distributions of material resources are undone, and thus no longer confer exaggerated political power to a minority of actors." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 10). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "The enjoyment of even modest property amid propertylessness and he taste of freedom amid slavery permanently tamed the lower elements of the citizenry." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 87). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "The third factor concerns how slavery and exclusionary laws of citizenship throughout the Greco-Roman period shaped the behaviors of a significant middle stratum of free citizens, who were objectively oppressed but subjectively grateful not to be either slaves or exploited noncitizens in the cities or the provinces." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 77). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• “The institution of serfdom as a mechanism of surplus extraction fused economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion at the molecular level of the village,” he writes. “The lord in his turn typically owed liege-loyalty and knight-service to a seigniorial overlord, who claimed the land as his ultimate domain.” It was precisely because the overlords’ property claims were so indefensible in the first place that they participated actively in creating a feudal structure that would, as the centuries unfolded, severely undermine overlord property claims." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 52). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]

Oligarchy and types of power

• "It is useful to think of five main individual power resources: power based on political rights, the power of official positions in government or at the helm of organizations, coercive power, mobilizational power, and finally material power." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 12). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "...as oligarchs become less engaged in direct rule and the coercion necessary to defend their wealth, and as others in society play a greater role in government, the range of issues influenced by oligarchs as a whole narrows dramatically to a set of core policies directly related to wealth defense. When this happens, and democracy takes root, there exists a broad spectrum of important policies around which oligarchs qua oligarchs play no vital role in setting the political agenda or shaping the outcomes. It is for this reason that it was argued at the outset that electoral democracy, except under exceedingly rare and extreme circumstances, does not encroach on or significantly diminish oligarchy as it has been defined here." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 74). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]

Oligarchy in Classical Greece & Rome

• "The greater the need oligarchs have to defend their property directly, the more likely it is that oligarchy will assume the form of “direct rule” by oligarchs, with other power resources and roles, such as holding government office, “layered” on top of or blended with their material power substratum.[Winters. Oligarchy (p. 7). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "Property defense refers to the effort by oligarchs or some external guarantor to ensure that their riches are not taken by those who covet them. “Taking” can be vertical, as when the poor attack the rich from below and redistribute their property, or when a state or autocratic ruler seizes property from above. Taking can also be horizontal, as when one oligarch encroaches on the holdings of another." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 23). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "Although the great mass of oligarchic wealth during the Greco-Roman era was in the countryside, the oligarchs lived in and personally ruled from the urban areas. The economy made up of the countryside estates and smaller farms on the periphery of Athens and Rome, even as late as the fourth century C.E., was roughly twenty times the economy of the capital cities. “The classical world was,” as Anderson (1974a, 19) points out, “massively, unalterably rural in its basic quantitative proportions.” He describes this imbalance as an “anomalous supremacy of town over country”" [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 76). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]

Oligarchy in Midieval Europe

• "Feudalism came into existence as great landed nobles were forced to outsource the heavy burdens of wealth defense they could no longer bear themselves. In effect, they “hired” coercive capacities by a process of subcontracting." [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 51). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]
• "A feudal fief was “not just a grant of land to a warrior follower,” Critchley (1978, 37) argues, “but a conditional grant.”" [Winters. Oligarchy (p. 51). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.]

Oligarchy in Zihæt

• Asteriápolis is a ruling oligarchy with wealth concentrated in the five families, supported by slavery
• Holy Empire of Humanité is a warring oligarchy with wealth concentrated in the emperor and noble families, supported by serfdom.
• Venúék is a sultanistic oligarchy, with wealth concentrated in the imperial family.

Sources

• Oligarchy, Jeffrey A Winters, 2011. ISBN 0521182980, Amazon.com
• Wikipedia: Oligarchy