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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

"Oligarch" originally meant the post-soviet kleptocrats who were handed control over formerly state companies at discount prices.

They're not rich because they built a company and bought their way into political power (which is how many Western billionaires are made) but because they had political connections and used them to capture state assets. The result is that they are dependent on the government for their wealth- if they piss off the President, they'll get thrown in jail or slipped polonium. So they ended up becoming unofficial conduits of government power.

In the West, it can end up being the other way around, with governments becoming instruments of corporate power.

Whether it makes sense to call both kinds of wealthy people "oligarchs" is up to you, I guess.

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> "Oligarch" originally meant the post-soviet kleptocrats who were handed control over formerly state companies at discount prices.

Aristotle already pioneered the use of the term as meaning "rule by the rich for the rich" aka plutocracy [0].

That's why the US can also be considered an oligarchy [1].

[0] https://fs.blog/2017/02/aristotles-politics/

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

maybe this plutocracy/oligarchy framing will break out and overtake the identity politics so dominating the culture (in the US) right now (hoping, but not hopeful).

the problem is not the color of your skin but the imbalance in power caused by many, many decades (5 centuries for some!) of intentional opportunity disparity, with wealth concentration as the metric.

a functioning democracy relies on dispersion of power, which is why we have separation of powers in the constitution in the first place.

the other critical component of a democracy is having an informed and active citizenry. the blame for the current dysfunction lies with all citizens, not just our plutocrats and politicians (although they certainly shoulder a larger proportion). sometimes we need to lean into adversity to maintain our freedoms, rather than hoping some hero will come along and shield us from it.

Exactly. I believe the focus on identity politics, rather than class, to be a big strategic mistake by the left. The emphasis should not be on race, sex, sexual orientation, etc, because although those are serious problems that need to be tackled, they can NEVER be the priority over class, which is and remains by far the greatest source of inequality in the world (again, notwithstanding other factors also being sources of inequality).

It's such a bad job that I wonder how much of it is intentional misdirection, distraction from the true issues.

I agree. For quite some time, I've told people that I no longer pay attention to the social left, when it is the economic side of left politics that makes the greatest difference, even to social issues. If you ensure that people who are otherwise marginalised have money, they will have enough influence through their buying power to effectively punish the classes who want them to remain marginalised.

Which is why it matters for the elites to make sure the ones who've been marginalized don't have money. Sure puts a different spin on not hiring someone for "culture fit".

I see an obvious flaw in this plan.

How do you ensure the economic power of say, gay people, when they can be legally fired from their job for just being gay? When they can't even visit their dying loved ones in hospital because they're not allowed to be legally married, never mind get tax benefits or inherit pension benefits etc. How do you stop a majority from punishing them economically and punishing others who try to help them?

Can you talk me through how your approach would have worked for the civil rights movement in the 60s or how the various law currently being drafted that legally prevent people from boycotting specific countries would affect your plans if used against your suggestion?

Perhaps I should change my framing on this. Yes there are structures available able to subvert the system. Both do need to be worked on, but focusing on one without the other results in diminishing returns. We've focused on the social side of marginalisation for a long time, and I think we're about as far as we can get with it for the time being. We need to switch back to economic matters which also affect more people. Marginalised groups are already in the poorer majority, if for no other reason than the statistical likelyhood of not being particularly rich.

Once we've got more class majority equality, we can switch back to more focused issues.

To me it seems really stupid, from an economical perspective, to fire a competent employee just because their religion, world-views, sexuality or whatever doesn't align with your own. I'd hope such employees can find good employment elsewhere. If that'd be true, I'd say eventually these issues should work themselves out in the long run, since a more diverse company might be able to outcompete a less diverse company.

That is such a naive framing of this topic when you have structural forces at work here. An example is say half a century ago when you have 99% of businesses practicing racist hiring policies. You can talk about economical inefficiencies all you want but what ends up happening is a segment of the population who are left with no good employment and continuing their generational poverty.

All you read on HN is the thousand ways in which (software) companies are inefficient but stuck in their ways and the market doesn't sort it out. Long hours, butts in seats mentality are the ones I read last. Managers have their own incentives and a lot of those are about perceptions, not necessarily money.

With UBI, they should have enough to still be able to conduct themselves. If unreasonable expenses are still being hoisted on them, then that's still an economic issue. In other words, people should be empowered economically. Being fired for being gay is still a form of economic disempowerment.

It's not a "strategic mistake", but rather a sensationalist divisive message pushed by mass media / the establishment. If you're falling for it, you're falling right in line.

Referring to "the left" (or "the right", for that matter) is more of the same. The people who are more receptive to a certain style of thinking and the political club that exploits them are not a unified group.

Read my last paragraph :)

The people who fund the politicians and media who talk about identity politics are the upper class. They would be incentivized to talk about anything but class.

Read my last paragraph :p

the problem is not the color of your skin but the imbalance in power caused by many, many decades (5 centuries for some!) of intentional opportunity disparity

...which is frequently deployed against people with a different skin color. Class-based analysis is great, but a) it is not an exact science, contrary to the claims of many of its proponents, and b) avoiding the empirical fact of racial discrimination does not make it go away, any more than ignoring the empirical facts of misogyny or any other flavor of discrimination has caused them to go away.

You can argue that these different forms of discrimination are just disguises for class-based discrimination, but it's equally arguable that discrimination against people on the basis of immutable characteristics is a highly effective class ordering mechanism.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but imho it's problematic to consider class a characteristic that's easily mutable.

When social mobility is near non-existent, then class has effectively become it's very own immutable characteristic. People can be born into wealth and poverty just as much as they can be born with colored skin.

The "American dream" is the anti-thesis to that, stipulating that everybody can elevate themselves out of their lower-class if they just pull those bootstraps hard enough.

But how realistic is that actually nowadays, particularly to elevate larger parts of the population?

yah, racial discrimination is not solved by any means, but i do think the best strategy is tackling the now-many systemic failures of our supposed meritocracy as a way of loosening opportunities around racial discrimination rather than the other way around.

the current prominence of immigration in political discussions, for example, makes it easy to divide on racial lines rather than on fairness or economics, as republicans have effectively exploited. it's led to an economically irrational willingness to sacrifice growth (and its resultant opportunities) in favor of limiting non-white immigration (we cheer 2-3% growth as amazing, while other countries have double-digit growth--like china, whose economy is similarly sized).

so support immigration on economic grounds rather than racial ones, because it can grow the pie more fairly than plutocracy can. most white folks can get behind more growth, but not all will get behind direct compassion and fairness for non-white folks (as bad as that sounds).

> > "Oligarch" originally meant the post-soviet kleptocrats who were handed control over formerly state companies at discount prices.

> Aristotle already pioneered the use of the term as meaning "rule by the rich for the rich" aka plutocracy [0].

"Original" is a dangerous term which roywiggins shouldn't have used in this case. But roy is right about how the term got used in the Eastern European context. And while things happen in the west too, people complain as much or more billionaires who made it big as outsiders who (initially) had no such connections to political power.

Yup, I don't know about dangerous, but "original" was definitely innaccurate on my part!

It's a word that came to be attached to post-Soviet kleptocrats, so that's why it ends up being used in that context and not in Western contexts, since it's taken on the meaning of wealth extracted from the state by pure cronyism.

Technically, "oligarchy" means rule by the few (hoi oligoi). The alternative is rule of the many (hoi polloi), also called "democracy."

The distinction goes back to at least the Golden Age of Athens, in the 5th Century B.C. The Greek world was divided between cities ruled by the many and by the few, and every city had an internal struggle between elements favoring one or the other form of rule. If you favored democracy, you turned to Athens for help. Hoi oligoi turned to Sparta for help. It's a bit like the Cold War, with two superpowers with different ideologies vying for favor among the undecided states, and promoting internal factions favorable to one side or the other.

For me, I think that no matter what terms are used, the important point is that we don't automatically give "our" oligarchs, or Very High Net Worth Individuals, some sort of free pass on ethics simply because they aren't post-Soviet kleptocrats.

> The result is that they are dependent on the government for their wealth- if they piss off the President, they'll get thrown in jail or slipped polonium. So they ended up becoming unofficial conduits of government power.

Nobility. This concept is called nobility. History rhymes, again.

There's an aspect of cronyism present in Russia and former soviet states that isn't present in the west. But make no mistake, we don't have free markets in the US. We have players that get large, then strong-arm their way into creating regulation preventing new players due to too high of entry costs, or regulatory capture occurs.

This is a misleading way to frame it though. In the US, regulation creates speedbumps to competition. In Russia, competition will get you thrown in jail or killed.

That's an accurate history of how the word is used, but in terms of meaning it's system-neutral, being a conjunction of oligo and archon, or few + rulers. It's not like we don't have numerous oligopolies in the US.

"Oligarch" seems to mean "Nominated billionaire".

Oh boy, don't read up on the current president. You might be surprised.

Care to elaborate?

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