ByYen Makabenta
July 21, 2020
First word
TO help in the deconstruction of President Rodrigo Duterte’s grand claim about dismantling the Philippine oligarchy, I want to bring into the national conversation three ideas that have animated discussions of the subject:
First, German sociologist Robert Michels’ theory of “the iron law of oligarchy,” which states: “Who says organization, says oligarchy.”
Second, American sociologist C.Wright Mills’ theory of “the power elite,” which he presented in a book published in 1956, The Power Elite. In the book, he contended that those who lead the military, the corporate and the political elements of society dominate and run America.
Third, sociologist Graham Sandler’s contemporary concept of a “governing oligarchy,” which in more recent times has embodied the rule of a few in nations today.
The iron law of oligarchy
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an “iron law” within any democratic organization as part of the “tactical and technical necessities” of organization.
Michels’ theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.
According to Michels, all organizations eventually come to be run by a “leadership class,” who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization.
Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.
Bureaucratization and specialization are the driving processes behind the iron law. They result in the rise of a group of professional administrators in a hierarchical organization, which in turn leads to the rationalization and routinization of authority and decision-making.
Bureaucracy by design leads to centralization of power by the leaders. Leaders also have control over sanctions and rewards. They tend to promote those who share their opinions, which inevitably leads to self-perpetuating oligarchy.
The power elite
In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, American sociologist C. Wright Mills called attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate and political elements of society.
According to Mills, the eponymous “power elite” are those that occupy the dominant positions in the dominant institutions (military, economic and political) of a dominant country and their decisions (or lack of decisions) have enormous consequences, not only for the United States population but, “the underlying populations of the world.”
Mills formulated a very short summary of his book: “Who, after all, runs America? No one runs it altogether, but insofar as any group does, the power elite.”
C. Wright Mills was one of the first intellectuals in America to write that the complacency of the Eisenhower years left much to be desired.
The Power Elite called attention to three prongs of power in the US. First, business had shifted its focus from corporations that were primarily regional in their workforces and customer bases to ones that sought products in national markets and developed national interests. What had once been a propertied class, tied to the ownership of real assets, had become a managerial class, rewarded for its ability to organize the vast scope of corporate enterprise into an engine for ever-expanding profits.
Similar changes had taken place in the military sector of American society. Mills wrote that the “warlords,” his term for the military and its civilian allies, had once been “only uneasy, poor relations within the American elite; now they are first cousins; soon they may become elder brothers.”
Politicians and public officials who wield control over the executive and legislative branches of government constitute the third leg of the power elite. Mills believed that the politicians of his time were no longer required to serve a local apprenticeship before moving up the ladder to national politics.
For Mills, politics was primarily a facade. Historically speaking, American politics had been organized on the theory of balance: each branch of government would balance the other, competitive parties would ensure adequate representation and interest groups like labor unions would serve as a counterweight to other interests like business. But the emergence of the power elite had transformed the theory of balance into a romantic, Jeffersonian myth.
Whether or not America has a power elite at the top and a mass society at the bottom, however, it remains in desperate need of the blend of social science and social criticism, which The Power Elite offered.
Governing oligarchy
Lastly, I want to discuss briefly the ideas of Graham Sandler of the University College, London and his thesis of a governing or ruling oligarchy.
Taking off from Mills’ concept of the power elite, Sandler formulated his own concept of a governing oligarchy.
Sandler wrote in an essay online:
“C. Wright Mills’ documentation of the clustering of power in the hands of very small, interconnected minorities of military, corporate and political elites still resonates. The world has of course changed, but he has much to teach us.
There has been a reluctance to return to classical structural notions like class. Class, the new orthodoxy now has it, may have been the dominant aspect of stratification in industrial society in the past. But now class is one form of social division among many, and one rivaled by age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and so on…
But class, I suggest, is a more important driver of circumstance and opportunity in financial capitalism than it was in the postwar years; that is, class relations have reasserted themselves objectively. I accept, however, that class is less important for who we think we are or less salient subjectively. The failure to make this distinction has bedeviled recent debates about class.
When class is factored into sociological reflection or research it is often via socioeconomic classification systems like NS-SEC (National Statistics Socioeconomic Classification) or, in 2013, the much more culturally oriented Great British Class Survey (GBCS). There is no need here to rehearse the pros and cons of NS-SEC and the GBCS. What they both lack is any way of capturing the less than 1 percent of the population with true wealth and/or power. The privileged citizenry I have in mind are under-researched, in part because they can hide in large data sets.
This fraction of the 1 percent that the Occupy Movement contrasts with the rest of us, the 99 percent, is the key to understanding and explaining what is happening in the current phase of financial capitalism. One way to grasp this is through the concept a new dynamic of class/command… If the wealthy have always purchased power, they can now get more for their money than has been the case for a generation or three. We can track this transition to the present grotesque maldistribution of wealth — and income, too — but sociology should aspire to more than the explication of on-the-surface trends.
The class/command dynamic points beneath the surface to a new structural asymmetry between class and state. More precisely, a small hard core of capitalists — rentiers, FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100 CEOs (chief executive officers) and directors and, most conspicuously, financiers — have gained more leverage over the power elite of the state. Together, this privileged cabal of capitalists plus power elite now comprises a ruling oligarchy.
A very predictable consequence is growing inequality and creeping social disintegration and fragmentation. These are accomplished via market deregulation, in general, and the associated growth of more part-time and transitory work, weakening health and safety regulation, loss of work autonomy, outsourcing, zero contracts, the termination of final salary pension schemes and benefit cuts in particular. While the ruling oligarchy enters a stratosphere of privilege, tugging its think tank and new middle class allies in its wake, the squeezed middle/precariat and, far worse, a more-or-less abandoned segment of the old working class fall further and further behind.
These assertions of a revised class/command dynamic and emergence of a ruling oligarchy from the early to mid-1970s are, I suggest, sociologically unobjectionable and entirely consonant with the data. And yet the silence is, if not deafening, disconcerting. This is itself a matter of sociological interest and concern in its own right. Two challenges might be proffered.
The first arises out of a straightforward professional obligation. Implicit in all I have said is the need to research the recruitment, connections and day-to-day acts of those comprising the ruling oligarchy in order to more fully understand and explain the lot of the newly disadvantaged. Investigating the changing circumstances of the disadvantaged remains important, but the secret of their plight lies in the ruthlessly strategic behaviors of our ruling oligarchs.
To what extent and across which domains is class the principal driver? How comprehensively are the landowning, business, financial and political elites interconnected?
If they rarely have to conspire, how do they yet accomplish what Mills called ‘tacit understanding?’ Critically, what are the mechanisms that have permitted the ruling oligarchy’s undemocratic usurpation of influence, and how might these be exposed and countered?”
yenobserver@gmail.com
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