It’s tempting to imagine there must be some kind of conspiracy among the rich that has enabled them to become so dominant. But there’s no stable, coherent organisation, governed from a centre. Still, even rich individuals, acting on their own, have disproportionate political power. Modern plutocracy is just a set of ever-shifting alliances among rich organisations and individuals whose interests overlap sufficiently for them to find it useful to cooperate from time to time, as well as compete. Capitalism is too dynamic, fractious and anarchic for membership of the plutocracy to be fixed or for it to develop much organisation. As Marx said of capitalists, the key players are ‘hostile brothers’. Opportunism is the norm, plus a shared presumption of the impossibility of disinterested behaviour, excused by a quasi-religious belief in the miracle of ‘efficient markets’, as Hywel Williams observed. The infiltration and capture of the state by the rich has been a piecemeal process, with roots going back decades.

The most obvious manifestations of plutocracy are political donations and lobbying by business, the overlapping social and corporate networks and mutual courtship of top politicians and the rich, and the wealth and elite origins of politicians themselves (at the time of writing there are 18 millionaires in Britain’s cabinet, and a handful schooled at Eton). Less visible is the offshore world of tax havens, which allow the rich to escape the rules that apply to the rest of us. But the rule of the rich has still deeper foundations in the very structure of capitalism that enable them to dominate politics.

Silent power

As long as the commanding heights of the economy are controlled by a minority who do whatever yields them the highest profits, then, since governments need to support the economy in order to keep up employment and standards of living so as to retain electoral support, they need to keep the owners and controllers of big business sweet so that they will continue to invest. This is true of capitalism in both booms and crises. Even without any lobbying or political donations, those who control major businesses would still be in a dominant position. To varying degrees this structural source of power may be restrained by strong labour organisation, though globally mobile capital can easily escape it.