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].
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.
It's such a bad job that I wonder how much of it is intentional misdirection, distraction from the true issues.
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?
Once we've got more class majority equality, we can switch back to more focused issues.
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.
...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.
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?
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
Nobility. This concept is called nobility. History rhymes, again.
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.