Does power over our lives belong to the successful?

Kapitál

How do economic inequalities create oligarchy and influence democracy? Why is material power key to maintaining the political dominance of the wealthy, and what are the consequences for social justice? Expert perspectives reveal the hidden mechanisms of power in the current system.

Imagine that the weekly magazine Trend contained a crossword puzzle supplement. Grab a pencil and think: a penalty for success in three. Got it? Naturally: TAX. The left hates capable people, and uses the working person as a shield to rob the most skilled among us. Especially progressive tax is a defiance of (sub)average citizens who cannot stand that someone surpasses them, but at the same time would like to feast at their table. Typical Slovak mentality: “My goat died!” “And what are you so cheerful about?” “My neighbor’s two died!”

In libertarian theory, taxes primarily serve a therapeutic function, namely to ventilate the frustrations of losers. However, taxes can also serve several other purposes.

One of the generally accepted arguments in favor of higher taxation of above-average incomes and wealth is financing state services and public infrastructure, supporting those who create non-economic values, and helping people who depend on it. In this sense, taxes are a financial resource for social policy. The amount of money needed for it can be obtained through a diverse tax mix – including a single flat tax at an adequate level.

Moreover, taxes can also be a tool for balancing economic disparities. This function is precisely fulfilled by progressive taxation: the wealthier pay more not only in absolute terms but also relatively. So let’s hear what etatist extortionists defend these claims with!

Money Power in Slovak

The logic is as follows: capitalism necessarily creates and deepens economic inequalities. Greater wealth means more resources to influence and potentially control the entire politics. The result is rule by a few: oligarchy. This political phenomenon is the subject of Jeffrey A. Winters’ eponymous work, which was published last year in Czech translation with the author’s preface and Ondřej Lánský’s.

Isn’t deriving oligarchy from economic inequalities a logical fallacy? On what basis can one arrive at political consequences from economic premises? One can rely on the central principle of empirical sciences: proof by experience, in this case, social practice. Formal rules of the system can be anything, but power can be maintained only through control of economic resources. As Winters writes, “to claim otherwise means ignoring centuries of political analysis that examine the close connection between property and power”.

What does this specifically mean? Oligarchs can extract much more from their active and passive voting rights than an ordinary candidate or voter. If a wealthy person decides to found their own political party and run personally, they can afford a professional election team and extensive marketing campaign. And although Winters states that cases of oligarchs personally engaging in politics are rather rare, in recent years, on Slovakia as well, there’s no shortage of wealthy individuals entering politics: the first two of the four current leaders of Progressive Slovakia are entrepreneurs and investors, and the only president who previously did not serve in any political party was businessman Andrej Kiska. Even without listing other individuals with above-average wealth who have entered parliament, it’s clear what role wealth plays in political careers.

However, wealthy people do not have to personally engage in politics to secure protection and advocacy for their interests in Slovak politics. Oligarchs around (Slovak) Smer, Hlas and SNS are already quite well mapped; the Ministry of Health has been long-term infiltrated by people connected to private entrepreneurs, and pre-election media content owned by Penta speaks for itself. Those with money can use it for political donations and gain exclusive access to parliamentarians or government officials; they can pay professional lobbyists to write laws and push them as finished materials to MPs; and they can also fund “independent” think tanks that will influence the public and media not directly under their control.

An exception for operating ski lifts during the pandemic? No problem if you’re both the owner of a ski resort and the speaker of parliament. Loosening environmental protections around your development project? Much easier if you’re a private individual de facto spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment. Could more money be siphoned from healthcare at the expense of patients? It’s worth a try if you have the phone number of the Minister of Economy.

These examples illustrate only the privileges of oligarchs in setting rules, and all are positive – in the sense that they do not yet include much more frequent cases of ad hoc assistance (appointing compliant officials, tailoring public procurement parameters, individual grants, etc.) and do not capture the substantially more widespread negative practice of ensuring that certain legislation either does not or cannot pass through parliament (such as various types of regulations and taxes).

Argument with a bat

An aspect of the widespread idea about how democracy functions is captured by Masaryk’s credo: “Democracy – that is discussion”. It’s true, but only partly: in capitalist democracy, violence belongs at least as much as media and political pluralism. As Winters writes: “Extreme material stratification creates social conflicts. Highly unequal distribution of wealth cannot be achieved without enforcement, which means property claims and rights can never be separated from coercion and violence.” Since a person cannot protect their vast wealth alone, they must rely on “outsourced” protection. Historically, this was provided by private armies, but the modern legal state disarmed oligarchs and built a monopoly on the use of force in exchange for providing protection for their property.

“One of the most remarkable aspects of this defense,” Winters writes, “is that it is scale-blind. Property rights to enormous wealth – a constant source of social tension throughout history – are protected by the same methods and principles as property rights to garden furniture.” Therefore, it’s no surprise that when the idea of expropriating a national cultural monument, deliberately neglected to ultimately level it with the ground and free up a lucrative plot, spreads panic that this actually opens the way for bandits in bunkers to loot your cabinet based on a government decree.

Of course, even today, alongside the police, there are private armed groups – known as private security services – but they provide more tactical than strategic protection of property: they are not meant to prevent “capture” of land, apartment blocks, or factories, but to protect against theft or damage. The state is responsible for protecting ownership as such: if private security companies fail to prevent climate activists from occupying a mining site, squatters barricading themselves in an empty building, or workers occupying a factory, it will be police units, not private guards, who disperse the rebels. Especially in the case of regressive tax systems, where “the higher you climb the oligarchic ladder, the lower the effective tax rate” (as in the United States), exploitation of workers is carried to an art: the poor pay taxes that fund the protection of the wealthy’s property – among other things, even from themselves.

Libertarian defense of state violence would be that the use of force by the state is – and must be – possible only according to democratically adopted law. Theoretically no problem, but practice reveals the system’s true nature. Guess which side the state will take in a dispute between two rights: will it be the owner of a mining company damaging nature, or activists blocking a mine or quarry with violence? Which violation of the other side’s claims – private property rights vs. rights to a healthy environment – will be considered so urgent as to justify immediate police intervention? We all have in mind the image of the coal baron, who, based on scientific evidence, is taken away in handcuffs, and a court issues a preliminary injunction to stop mining... Capitalist democracy, then, is also an argument with a bat, which primarily and promptly serves oligarchs. Whenever claims conflict, state violence is primarily used to protect private property, never social rights. That is the principle of the social contract, which Hobbes did not sign with the civic community, but with oligarchy.

The Industry of Income Defense

Winters defines oligarchy as “a policy of defending wealth by materially equipped actors”. This defense has two components: “defense of property (securing basic claims to wealth and property) and defense of income (maintaining the largest possible flow of income and profits from own property, when property rights are secured).” Once the fundamental role of securing private property rights is fulfilled by the state, oligarchs remain focused on defending their income, i.e., minimizing their tax burden. For this purpose, the wealthy have at their disposal what Winters calls “the income defense industry,” a whole sector of economic-legal services aimed at “tax optimization”.

Accounting tricks to filter income from “social tithes” through tax havens, lobbying for special tax rates, negotiating tax reliefs: this is just a selection from the portfolio of tools that elite consulting firms, lobbying associations, and law firms legally (!) offer to wealthy clients. At the same time, this explains why in capitalism, the Matúš effect applies, and wealth grows more exponentially than linearly – the richer a person, the more effectively they can influence rules in their favor and avoid tax obligations. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle: the state collects less, and the private individual keeps more, making the state increasingly powerless against oligarchs, whose power grows until the state is overtaken and becomes a sovereign over it all – a trajectory already described by Marx, and today observable in the United States (and finally in Slovakia) with the naked eye. Meanwhile, it is true that “if political leaders responded aggressively to offshore havens, which help rob the US Treasury of tens of billions of dollars annually in unpaid taxes, they could label oligarchs as unpatriotic or a threat to national financial security. Instead, tracking assets offshore is portrayed as an invasion of corporate or personal privacy.”

The Range of Power

A skeptical reader might argue that oligarchic power is not absolute. It’s true. “It is useful to distinguish five main individual sources of power: power based on political rights, power arising from official position in government or leading organizations, coercive power, mobilization power, and finally material power.” Material power is the one wielded by oligarchs, and the other types of power should, in political theory of liberalism, be natural “brakes and counterweights” to the force stemming from wealth. From a leftist perspective, however, material power and its other types are not equivalent, since the latter are dependent on the former in the long term and systemic view. Put simply, the one who controls your livelihood and standard of living rules in reality. If you have money, you can buy the other types of power.

Power based on political rights means the right to vote and be elected: undoubtedly a privilege citizens have over non-citizens, but this power alone still means little. Its practical impact only becomes apparent when it transforms into power derived from an official position, i.e., when a person becomes a MP, minister, etc. This power, however, is much easier to obtain on the basis of material power than without it: as demonstrated above, in politics, a wealthy person is much more likely to advance than an ordinary citizen. That’s why political elites are structurally dependent on oligarchy, although they can sometimes emancipate themselves from it temporarily in exceptional cases. Winters bluntly states in the American context that “long before ordinary citizens get to vote on a candidate list of a political party, the choice is limited to politicians considered acceptable to the wealthiest Americans, through the ‘primaries of wealth,’ in which initial campaign funding is inaccessible to candidates who deviate from the narrow political program.” Of course, this applies to every capitalist democracy, but not with the same clarity in every country, depending on the size of the economy and state.

Money can also buy coercive power, whether it’s raw violence (recall the murder of Ján and Martina, which was apparently motivated also by threats to oligarchic economic interests) or “just” threats, blackmail materials, extortion, etc.

Engagement for Sale

Finally, there is mobilization power, which is closest to what we might call the power of thought or personality. It is similar to material power in that it can also be exchanged for other types: through mobilization by a powerful idea or personality, disadvantaged individuals or movements can sometimes succeed politically (an example is Mamdani’s recent victory in New York), and ideology or a prominent leader can mobilize coercive power (recall the role of people’s militias in February 1948). The fundamental difference between material and mobilization power, however, lies in that mobilization power “requires a significant and permanent personal involvement of the actors involved, [...] it is not delegative, but rather directly depends on personal time commitment and participation,” whereas material power can simply be paid for. In this context, I quote Winters’ highly illustrative, and therefore longer, excerpt:

“Material power is unique in that it allows oligarchs to buy a permanent engagement of others who do not have personal involvement for the oligarchs’ goals. Their only requirement is a material reward for their services. Oligarchs are the only citizens in liberal democracies who can promote their personal political goals indirectly, yet intensely, by exerting strong influence through a professional army of qualified actors (working-class middle and upper-class workers who help create oligarchic outputs), who work full-time as paid defenders and protectors of the main oligarchic interests. Their daily work is fully dedicated to achieving continuous victories for oligarchs – and they compete vigorously for the payments offered by oligarchs to defend their wealth and income. These professional teams and hired advocates do not need ideological motivation to stay operational, and they are not subject to mobilization fatigue, disorientation, or mutually exclusive programs. They are well paid to exert maximum effort year after year, decade after decade. No social or political force seeking policies threatening oligarchic interests can match this commitment and perseverance.”

Put simply – those without wealth can only attain political power through maximum mobilization and concentrated effort, while for oligarchs, political power is permanent and time always works in their favor: strikers cannot stay without income for long, protesters in the streets get tired over time, politicians attacking oligarchic interests will sooner or later be discredited by professional vetting or smear campaigns. Have you noticed how every prominent leftist politician from Corbyn through Mamdani to Mélenchon is systematically discredited with accusations of antisemitism?

Personal and Private Property

When I read Winters’ book, until page eighty-five I kept asking myself: does the author confuse the terms – does he mean more like plutocracy all along? But the reference to Aristotle’s Politics showed that this is not a mistake. As the ancient classic writes, “Oligarchy is a state form where the wealthy hold the highest power, the opposite is democracy, where the propertyless and poor do not rule. […] The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is in wealth.” What to take from this? Mainly that oligarchy is not the rule of “any” few, but always of a few “wealthy”.

The main objection that can be made to Winters’ theory is that he does not distinguish between personal and private property. The consequence is that his problem with wealth lies more in its amount than in its type (however closely related), and thus, instead of a clear critique of private property, he must constantly remind that he has in mind vaguely defined “extreme” wealth.

Why is this distinction important? Here’s an example. In the preface to the Czech translation, Lánský and Winters, based on sociological research, point out that “in the Czech public space, privatization and restitution of larger property are generally viewed negatively, while restitution of smaller property is more positive”. Let’s assume that “larger property” here corresponds, say, to a network of factories, and “smaller property” to a simple craft workshop, for example, a small workshop. Certainly, there is a difference in the scope of wealth these production units can generate. Primarily, however, it’s about the fact that while the factory owner from the other end of the country has only an indirect relationship to the product, the craftsman is directly connected to their product. Put another way, the owner of a large factory can claim profit based on invested capital, not their work, whereas for a small artisan, it’s exactly the opposite.

The distinction is thus simple: my personal property is what I use individually and directly. Everything I own additionally (several barrels of oil in Rotterdam, an investment apartment in Barcelona, or an avocado plantation in Central America) is my private property. The institution of personal property leaves room for a higher standard of living for those who create extraordinary social value through their effort, but at the same time ensures that individual wealth does not become a tool for domination and exploitation of others – as is the case with private property.

Until now, I have not understood why it would not be enough if a brilliant inventor, talented artist, or hardworking manager was rewarded for their extraordinary social contribution with “only” an apartment on Manhattan, a Bugatti in the garage, and the ability to dine every evening at Michelin, but additionally they had the right to own a villa on every continent, operate a full fleet of Ferraris, and have in their investment portfolio a luxury restaurant chain. Therefore, I propose a clarification of Winters’ idea with my own crossed-out and underlined suggestion: “If extreme personal” private property is impossible or does not exist, then oligarchs do not exist either.”

Democracy – but what kind?

The conceptual ambiguity can easily lead to misinterpretation of such fundamental statements as that “oligarchy coexists with democracy surprisingly easily”. The problem lies in the vagueness of what is meant by democracy. He himself points out that democracy can be narrowly equated with the implementation of democratic methods, but that does not explain anything – what are “democratic methods”?

Democracy can have a range of meanings. It can refer to a system of formal signs – elections, after all, also took place in the People’s Democratic and Normalization Czechoslovakia. Sometimes, when we speak of democracy, we mean political procedures detached from the context of other social processes and influences: in this sense, democracy is most often understood today. Finally, democracy can also refer to thorough autonomy, taking into account all circumstances involved in making self-governing decisions, as in radical democracy. And these are by no means the only possible meanings of this semantically remarkably flexible word.

When assessing how compatible oligarchy and democracy are, then, everything depends on which of these meanings we work with. Liberal democracy is undoubtedly fully compatible with oligarchy, as evidenced by daily news – and this is because “in representative democracy, practically no restrictions are embedded that could effectively limit the material forms of power that oligarchs wield”. Conversely, oligarchy and democracy exclude each other if we do not interpret democracy formally, but as a political system where power is as decentralized as possible and the political struggle for positions, where power is reasonably concentrated, is conducted under equal material conditions.

From a liberal perspective, assuming elections are held every four years, multiple TV stations broadcast, and you do not go to jail for criticizing the government, such a system is democratic. Likewise, a system with enormous economic inequalities, where people work twelve hours a day and higher education costs money, is considered democratic. From a leftist perspective, however, the key difference between the two regimes is in the degree of their “democratic-ness”. The reason is straightforward: if you can live decently and fulfill your needs, you have enough time to engage in public affairs, you are equipped with historical consciousness, and know your human, civic, and social rights, then your decisions can be considered more informed and freer (at least in relation to immediate existential pressures), regardless of how you vote. A single mother working after her shift at the checkout, who also goes somewhere to clean, can hardly vote with the same detachment and rationality as an academic or entrepreneur – not to mention their chances of being elected. Here, the comparison is not between specific individuals but between social types that liberal democracy systematically disadvantages in political participation, and ultimately, in control over their own lives. Empirical research also clearly shows: in liberal democracies, political representation mainly considers the opinions and needs of the wealthy, while fulfilling the economic interests of the rest of the electorate is insignificant, since their harm at the polls is not punished.

Admire, but not imitate

Wealth and private property are ideological bastions that have survived Enlightenment, modernist, and postmodern attacks on dogmas and fashions that limit freer thinking and better lives for all. When you question the claim of an American billionaire to destroy lives with their products – or working conditions in their offices and factories – people around the world, the seven-voice chorus of the declassed liberal intelligentsia, will rise to expose, isolate, and pacify leftist extremism. Hopefully in the hope that the Davos gentlemen will throw some crumbs to save democracy from people taking it seriously and to overtly. As Winters writes:

“Oligarchs differ from all other power minorities because the basis of their power – material wealth – is extraordinarily resistant to dispersion and equalization. It’s not just that it’s difficult to disperse oligarchs’ material power. It’s that enormous personal wealth is an extreme form of social and political power imbalance, in which, despite significant progress in recent centuries on other fronts, injustice has been maintained since ancient times by the ideological construction that it’s unfair to reform it. Across dictatorships, democracies, monarchies, peasant societies, and post-industrial formations, the idea that radical redistribution of wealth is wrong remains remarkably persistent. The same cannot be said about attitudes towards slavery, racial exclusion, gender dominance, or denial of citizenship.”

Is oligarchy worth it for good oligarchs?

Capitalism, a system defined by profit above all else and the inviolability of private property, necessarily produces extreme inequality, and “extreme inequality in material conditions also creates extreme inequality in politics”. Those who believe that secret elections, political pluralism, and freedom of speech are enough for democracy have no reason to be concerned. But if we believe that

then we cannot condescendingly tolerate the historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and seriously talk about protecting democracy.

No “enlightened” oligarch is a benefit to democracy to the extent that their far-right counterpart threatens it. Systemic protection and development of democracy begin with reducing economic inequalities – among other things, also through progressive taxation and meaningful redistribution of wealth. And this does not mean helicopter money dropped from a Bambi parachute over the Hnilčík valley, but investments in people, developing their abilities, and a dignified everyday life.

Jeffrey A. Winters: Oligarchy. Prague: Filosofia, 2025. Translated by Marek Tomeček.

The author is a postdoctoral researcher in Slovak language and literature

The text was created with the support of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic