Titans of Capital updates and expands my earlier book Giants: The Global Power Elite (2018). Giants identified the 199 directors of the world’s 17 top asset management companies, which between them managed more than $41.1 trillion in wealth. Now, five years later, in Titans of Capital, I examine the ongoing rapid concentration of global capital and how fewer and larger companies now manage the excess financial wealth for the .05 percent (40 million) richest people in the world. As a political sociologist, I pose three research questions: To what extent do the wealthy influence—or even dominate—decision-making that affects all of us in society? Who are the most powerful people? And how does the process of influence or domination work?
Capitalism protects private ownership of property, business, and personal wealth. Governments control the legal and policing mechanisms that ensure wealth remains privately owned and that, to varying degrees, allow concentrated wealth to be used to amass even greater wealth. I review the academic research that addresses these sociological questions and contribute new research that offers a more in-depth analysis of the socioeconomic structures that facilitate massive wealth concentration and its inevitable worldwide consequences, including growing inequality, grinding poverty, and environmental destruction. My work now covers changes over five years that demonstrate how individuals and networked groups have evolved over time, thereby allowing me the opportunity for a macroanalysis of how national and transnational elites—whom I call Titans—mold the world to their liking.
Yes, the upper elites, who are one-twentieth of 1 percent (0.05) of the world’s population, get richer, and the rest of us struggle to get by. More than half of the world’s population lives in semi-poverty, tormented by combinations of poor nutrition, homelessness or the threat of it, and inadequate healthcare.
Sociologically, current global trends mean an even greater concentration of wealth, resources, and power in the hands of .05 percent of the world’s population—and increasingly scarce resources and influence for the rest of us. Decisions made by elites regarding investments and economic policies affect the entire world, but not always for the better. The global consequences of extreme wealth inequality include wars and threats of war, repressed human rights and due processes, and environmental devastation. We are in a crisis of humanity, which William I. Robinson, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes as a threat to the survival of our species and all living things. Were nuclear war to become a reality rather than just a threat, most life on earth would be destroyed; meanwhile, the somewhat slower destruction of the environment poses similar dangers—many of which could occur within the life expectancy range of most humans living on Earth today.
The Titans are at the power elite core of the transnational capitalist class. They represent the interests of several hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top .05 percent of the world’s wealth hierarchy.
The Titans generally know or know of each other—often personally. They do business together, all hold significant personal wealth, share similar educational and lifestyle backgrounds, and retain common global interests. They serve on the boards of directors of the largest major capital investment firms and often other major corporations as well. They meet in nongovernmental policy organizations and form new ones as needs arise to privately make decisions for governments, security forces, and world institutions to implement. The Titans of Capital share a common ideological identity as the engineers of global capitalism, and they hold a mistaken belief that their way of life and the continuous growth of capital are best for all humankind.
The resources of the world ought to belong to humanity as a natural right of being alive. By allowing extreme inequality to exist in the world, we deny our collective humanity. We must call for the redistribution of concentrated capital to meet the minimum standard of living for all humans. This is not such a radical idea. Even the World Economic Forum is calling for a living wage as a natural right that is beneficial to businesses and workers alike.
However, the difficulty is that inequality cannot be addressed by simply paying employees a better wage. We must decide to address the Titans and their 40 million wealthy clients, directly asking them to reverse the continuing concentration of capital by sharing their wealth more openly. They are people with names and addresses who can be asked to make the necessary changes to end human suffering and to save what is left of the environment.
We are all stakeholders in the world, with the right to challenge, individually and collectively, gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth…. Fiduciary wealth management must include assets for human betterment, not just the maximization of return on capital. The Titans must allocate a certain percent of their wealth management capital to end hunger and extreme poverty in the world. …. Fiduciary wealth management must include assets for human betterment, not just the maximization of return on capital. The Titans must allocate a certain percent of their wealth management capital to end hunger and extreme poverty in the world, and, if they remain unresponsive, to engage in creative direct actions that get their attention in different ways.
Global imperialism is a manifestation of concentrated wealth, managed by an elite association of several hundred people, among whom the 117 Titans examined in this book are predominant. On the opposite side stand innumerable activists who campaign for human rights, civil liberties, and democratic governance. We must stand on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and challenge global imperialism and its fascist governments, media propaganda, and armies of empire, as fully and nonviolently as possible. Allowing the continued concentration of wealth by the Titans is a recipe for extreme poverty, environmental disaster, and global nuclear war.
Our agenda must be full resistance to the Titans of Capital. We can oppose the counter-democratic consequences of concentrated wealth by championing democratic, grassroots decision-making processes that promote human rights and protect the world’s environment.
Adapted from Titans of Capital: How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity by Peter Phillips (Seven Stories Press). Published with permission.
Author Bio:
Peter Phillips is Professor of Political Sociology (Emeritus) at Sonoma State University, former Director of Project Censored 1996 to 2010, and President of Media Freedom Foundation 2003 to 2017. He has been editor or co-editor of 14 editions of Censored, was co-editor with Dennis Loo of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney (2006), and the editor of two editions of the Progressive Guide to Alternative Media and Activism (1999 & 2004). He is author of Giants: The Global Power Elite (2018). He was co-host of the weekly Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio with Mickey Huff from 2010 to 2017, originating from KPFA in Berkeley and airing on 50 stations nationwide. He taught courses in Political Sociology, Sociology of Power, Sociological of Media, Sociology of Conspiracies, and Investigative Sociology. He was winner of the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in 1997 for Best Political Book, PEN Censorship Award 2008, Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications 2009, and the Pillar Human Rights Award from the National Associations of Whistleblowers 2014.
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