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In Armenia the Rich Rule: Liberal Democracy Is Plutocracy

By Markar Melkonian

A politician in Yerevan recently noted that, “if the oligarchs are omitted from the National Assembly, only one or two MP’s will remain, and the cabinet will be empty.”

What is obviously true of the legislature is just as obviously true of the Presidency and the Ministries, the judiciary, and local and regional state agencies.  In Armenia today, as in other capitalist democracies, the wealthiest few hold a near-total monopoly of political power.

But this all-too-evident truth flies in the face of the “mainstream political science” taught in places like the American University of Armenia.

One of the most influential American political philosophers of the last century, John Rawls, claimed that in a liberal democracy like the United States, “political power is the coercive power of free and equal citizens as a corporate body.” Perhaps it should count as an achievement that a liberal thinker has at least managed to acknowledge the essentially coercive character of political power. But in what sense are citizens of a state that is dominated by the super-wealthy few “equal” as a corporate body—let alone “free”?

The modern liberal state, we hear, is a level playing field upon which a wide range of multiple interest groups compete to influence the electorate. Mainstream political thinkers call this view of democratic politics Majoritarian Pluralism. According to their story, this is what the American political system is all about, and other liberal democracies, too.  Bringing this kind of democracy to Armenia is the advertised aim of more than one of the one-man shops that go by the name of political parties in Yerevan these days.

But let us take a closer look at Majoritarian Pluralism.  If it were right, then this would make a difference when it comes to how policy is made.  It would have implications, for example, when it comes to what sets of actors have influence over public policy and how much influence they have.  If Majoritarian Pluralism were genuine, then in liberal democracies, mass-based interest groups, such as large consumer advocacy organizations, grass-roots environmental movements, and popularly supported anti-corruption campaigns should have a direct impact on public policy.

As it turns out, though, these implications are not borne out by real events on the ground—and this is true especially in countries like the United States.

In a paper entitled “Testing Theories of American Politics,” researchers Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University present the results of a multivariate analysis, conducted by a large team of researchers, to compare the predictions of Majoritarian Pluralism and other leading theories in the study of American politics.  Their research, which included measures of key variables for 1779 policy issues, is the most exhaustive study of its kind that has yet been undertaken.

“The central point that emerges from our research,” Gilens and Page write, “is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”  The study refutes Majoritarian Pluralism, as well as the familiar Majoritarian Electoral Democracy view (according to which political power lies with the electorate), and it confirms the implications of two alternative views of American politics, which academics call Biased Pluralism and Economic Elite Domination.  The later views are represented, notably, by Marxist political theory.

So let us be clear:  the most exhaustive comparative empirical study yet conducted on theories of American democracy by “mainstream political scientists” shows conclusively that:  (i) the view of liberal democracy that the American University and Armenia’s one-man-shop political parties have prescribed are inaccurate; and (ii) the Economic Elite Domination view and the Biased Pluralism view, represented most notably in Marxist political theory, far more accurately describe American democracy.

In America, just as in Armenia, the big capitalists as a group hold a near-monopoly on political power.  In the USA, no less than in the Republic of Armenia, the rich rule. But then of course “we all know this”:  it is lived experience of tens of millions of people daily.  In highly stratified countries, wealth just is economic power; economic power is power over others; economic inequality is political inequality.

Yerevan’s pro-Western opposition might deny this truth, but it is not a recent revelation.  In the book of Proverbs 22:7 we read:  “The rich ruleth over the poor and the borrower is servant to the lender.”This insight is part of a “wisdom tradition” that goes back more than two and one-half millennia.

It would seem, then, that Armenia’s pro-Western opposition has swallowed political assumptions that fly in the face of everyday experience, ignore ancient wisdom, and defy the best contemporary empirical research by the best of America’s “mainstream political scientists” themselves.

In a previous discussion (“Armenians Need to Lose Their Faith in the Free Market,” Hetq.am, Feb. 7, 2015), we learned that recent empirical research, as exhaustive and careful as it gets, confirms that, in the West no less than in Armenia:  (a) there are huge gaps between the rich and vast majority of the “citizens,” and (b) capitalism left to its own “free market” devices tends to increase the gap between the richest few and the rest. 

To these insights, we may now add another:  (c) in capitalist democracies, the richest rule.  Conclusion:  in liberal democracies of the West no less than in Armenia, “the free-market system” increasingly concentrates wealth, and thus political power, in the hands of a tiny minority of the population. 

Yerevan’s overawed admirers of everything American, then, are looking in the wrong place if they really want an alternative to Armenia’s plutocracy.  If successful, they would—once again--only replace one set of plutocrats with another.

One might think that this consideration, true and important as it is, would make a difference to political discourse in the Republic of Armenia.  After twenty-five years of political manipulation, deeper and deeper poverty, and demographic disaster, one might expect that a generalized skepticism would prevail in Armenian today when it comes to the constantly repeated flimflam connecting capitalism to freedom.

The good news is that some of our young compatriots are learning lessons that the counter-revolutionaries of the 1990s denied, and that their parents were too exhausted to acknowledge.  

Striking workers at the Nayarit plant make the connection between capitalism and plutocracy, as do protesters against privatized-bus fare hikes and electricity-rate hikes.  So do those who oppose deforestation, strip mining, the privatization of public land, raging corruption, and the beating of dissidents. 

These young compatriots do not take their petitions to foreign embassies, and they do not cast votes for the candidates of the one-man shops that pass for political parties these days.  Through their actions they have shown that the best counterforce against the ongoing abuses by Armenia’s plutocrats is resistance from the bottom—from the streets, social media, offices, factories, and public squares. 

The next step for these young people is to come together, to share lessons learned, to pool their resources, to organize not just against today’s plutocrats, but also against the ones who would replace them. 

The challenge facing our young compatriots is to build a common vision and a common organization to fight against plutocracy altogether--and to fight for workers’ power. 

(Markar Melkonian is a nonfiction writer and a philosophy instructor.  His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (Humanities Press, 1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (I.B. Tauris, 2005, 2007), a memoir/biography about Monte Melkonian, co-written with Seta Melkonian)

Comments (4)

Simon Clarke
I doubt that liberal democracy legitimizes plutocracy, because it is possible to have a liberal democracy without political processes being dominated by the rich, or at least politics which are not as dominated by the rich as much as happens in some states such as USA, Russia, and as you say Armenia. Look at the Scandinavian countries for example. Wealthy people there still probably have more political power than the poor, but their influence is not as exaggerated as in other states. And this is because those countries have followed policies such as those I mentioned in my first post, policies that try to insulate politics from wealth such as publicly funded elections, etc. The problem with the 'liberal democracy legitimizes plutocracy' view is that it is not clear that there is any viable alternative. What should we have instead of liberal democracy? Authoritarianism? Complete equalization of wealth (thus undermining incentives for economic activity)?
Markar Melkonian
The following are some miscellaneous responses to Mr. Hayrapetyan’s miscellaneous comments: The “D” in “DPRK” stands for “Democracy.” That dynastic regime is no more socialist than it is democratic. Corruption was ubiquitous in the USSR. But now, twenty-five years later, long after the institutions had been fundamentally transformed along capitalist lines, Armenians endure corruption that far exceeds the worst years of the Soviet era. And then there is the consideration of pervasive corruption in capitalist countries today. It would have been better for Mr. Hayrapetyan’s case if he had not brought up the topic of corruption at all. Yes, Adam Smith argued that capitalism is a system of “natural liberty.” Capitalism is a system of “natural liberty” in exactly the same way that, as Aristotle argued, slavery is a feature of the “natural order.” Mr. Hayrapetyan does not like the Republic of Cuba. If Cuba is a poor country today, let us remind ourselves that it was an affluent country thirty years ago. We can thank Cuba’s lower standards of living on fifty years of economic embargo, the Helms-Burton Act, and American coercion of Cuba’s former trading partners. Even with the lower standards of living, though, Cuba beats the USA when it comes to many metrics for public health, childcare, and education. Moreover, Cuba has lower incarceration rates than the USA, lower rates of violent crime, and less state intrusion into the daily lives of ordinary citizens than in the United States. (We can be pretty sure, by the way, that the NSA is monitoring even this online exchange.) For decades, the Republic of Cuba, even with the embargo and its limited resources, has sent out thousands of physicians and engineers to the poorest countries of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Over the years, Cuban physicians have saved tens of thousands of lives and have trained thousands of local people to improve the conditions of life for the poorest of the poor. At least one impartial and unbiased graduate of Political Science at AUA is unimpressed. He reserves his admiration, it seems, for an imperialist country that has used its vast wealth and power to foment fanaticism and sectarian strife, and to wage trillion-dollar wars on five continents. If Mr. Hayrapetyan is worried about poverty and repression in Latin America, perhaps he should read Eduardo Galeano’s book, The Open Veins of Latin America. There, he will get an idea of the exploitation, disease, dictators, death squads, and dirty wars that the United States of America has foisted onto hundreds of millions of people on that continent. He might also gain an insight as to why one cannot point to more countries where workers have power. It turns out that when workers and the poor have achieved electoral victories, the CIA has been ready, over and over again, to overthrow their democratic leaders and replace them with dictators. I wonder how it is that Mr. Hayrapetyan is privy to “the Castro family” finances. Years ago, Forbes magazine claimed, preposterously, that Fidel Castro was one of the wealthiest men on earth. Mainstream American journalists quickly refuted the claim, and when they publicly challenged Steve Forbes to substantiate it, he was unable to do so. Since then, the mass release of secret bank account records has revealed many surprises, including an account belonging to our own Catholicos. But where in the long list of records does the “Castro family” name appear? Today, by all reports, the former President of the Republic of Cuba owns not one square inch of land. He lives in a modest house, eats a mostly vegetarian diet, and spends much of his time reading and trying to stay out of the limelight. Repeating the unsubstantiated and discredited claims of the likes of Steve Forbes is no way to model unbiased and impartial behavior. Nor is repeating the lies of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. Armenians do not need to compromise our well-documented case of genocide against Turkey by associating ourselves with the hallucinations of fanatical and dishonest authors of Black Books. Mr. Hayrapetyan asks rhetorically if Armenia should go back to the Soviet Union. Whether it “should” or not, this will never happen, ever. But come to think of it, it might be interesting for Mr. Hayrapetyan, a student of Political Science, to pose this question to citizens of Armenia today. When the Pew Center conducted a poll a few years ago, the majority of Czech and Polish respondents indicated that life had been better “under communism” than under their current capitalist systems. Yes, this would be an interesting question to ask Armenians. Is Marxism “topical”? Well, not much more topical that Darwinism these days. It certainly is less topical than Wahhabi Islam—which is also far more topical these days than American-style “political science.” The question for social science is not whether a theory is topical or not. The question is whether it is true or not.
Markar Melkonian
The comments are much appreciated. Permit me to make the following responses. (To make it easier to post, I have divided my comments into two parts, which I will upload separately.) First of all, my occasional contributions to Hetq.am are opinion pieces. It should go without saying that they do not necessarily reflect the views of Hetq. The purpose of my contributions is to do my small part to broaden the discussion of possible solutions to Armenia’s predicament, by introducing a very different conceptual vocabulary from the buzzwords, slogans, and clichés that have served the people of Armenia so poorly for the past quarter of a century. Sadly, I have not taken a course at AUA. But I am a proud graduate of the associated University of California, and so are my daughters. In fact, as students at UC Berkeley, my daughters joined their fellow students in publicly opposing moves to further privatize the university, where tuition has more than tripled since 2001. I have had the honor of knowing several faculty members and administrators at AUA, perhaps six of them over the years. Every one of them has come off as an honest and decent person. So my limited experience jibes with what Ms. (or is it Dr.?) Paturyan has written about her colleagues. Not all of my friends at AUA, however, would uncritically accept that its sole purpose is to “prepare students and enable faculty and researchers to address the needs of Armenia and the surrounding region,” as the mission statement describes it. The same doubts could be raised about USAID, Western-based NGO’s, and foreign missionary activity in the country. Many of the foreign-based organizations are manned by dedicated and sincere personnel. But the very existence of these institutions on the ground in countries like Armenia serves an ideological and political function. It is not my intention to mar the name of the AUA. Let us remind ourselves, though, that many institutions and individuals have had their names marred in recent years, including some of the greatest benefactors of Armenia. Not that it makes much difference, but just for the record: I do not oppose the existence of AUA. On the contrary, I wish there were more “UAs” in Armenia. We should welcome a CUA (a Chinese University of Armenia), a BUA (a Brazilian University of Armenia), and an IUA (an Iranian University of Armenia). Why only an AMERICAN University of Armenia? Ms. Paturyan’s observations about the responsibility and activism of AUA students are very welcome; they are another reason for optimism. To the extent that Ms. Paturyan and her colleagues have encouraged these young women and men, they deserve our gratitude.
Simon Clarke
Mainstream political science and the professors at American University of Armenia are well aware of the dangers of liberal democracy becoming a plutocracy. The political philosopher you quote, John Rawls, was setting out an ideal of liberal democracy that he believed societies should aim at, an ideal in which all people would be free and equal citizens. He was very concerned about the dominance of wealth in the the US political system and spent much of his later years (he died in 2002) warning about the danger. Majoritarian Pluralism is also an ideal, one possible model of democracy, and mainstream political scientists who discuss it do not necessarily believe that actual democracies fit the model. At American University of Armenia we do not teach students to think that the US model of politics is the best. In fact, we don't teach that any is 'the best'. Rather, we give a neutral overview of the different systems that exist and systems that could exist, and we equip students with the tools needed to critically assess the systems for themselves. My own personal view is that political parties and campaigns should be insulated from the effects of economic inequalities by making parties and elections publicly funded, putting caps on donations from individuals and corporations, limiting the overall level of inequality in society, and prohibiting the pernicious practice of gift-giving to politicians. I don't go quite so far as Plato, who thought politicians should not be permitted to own any property at all, but certain measures are necessary to ensure that genuine democracy prevails. Associate Professor Simon Clarke Political Science and International Affairs Program American University of Armenia

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