The following article is based on a talk given at the April 21 Conference on Socialism in Oakland, Calif., hosted by the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Never before has there been so much inequality, and never before has inequality been so great.
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Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
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Our planet has fully 1.3 billion people living on less than $1 a day. Three billion people, or half the population of the world, live on less than $2 a day. Yet this same planet is experiencing unprecedented economic growth. The statistics that describe the accumulation of wealth in the world are mind-boggling. The most staggering statistics of all are those that reflect the polarization of this wealth.
Today, the richest 20 percent of the world’s population have 86 percent of the wealth. The poorest 20 percent of the world’s population have just barely 1 percent.
The world’s richest 1 percent receives as much income as the poorest 57 percent of the whole world’s population combined.
There is a connection between the pervasive poverty and marginalization prevailing in under-developed countries and the policies of the wealthiest and most developed nations on Earth that, with increasing selfishness and arrogance, constantly make their riches grow while impoverishing the so-called Third World.
Poverty is the result of centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism and of a criminal capitalist international economic order. A map of the African continent and the transportation infrastructure that was constructed during European colonization illustrates perfectly the connection between the underdevelopment and poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the wealth enjoyed by the United States and other imperialist nations.
This inequality, the growing distance between the rich and the poor, is a fundamental feature of capitalism. As Karl Marx pointed out in 1867, writing in “Capital,” “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery…at the opposite pole.” In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Global capitalism, driven by its quest for unending profits to expand across the globe, becomes a machine devouring our planet, reducing people to cogs in a machine, valued as cheap labor, otherwise disposable.
Under capitalism, there is no consensus that to eat is a basic human right. Hunger continues to be a daily reality for 852 million people while trillions of dollars are spent on weapons that will kill the hungry, not hunger.
Additionally, 13 million children continue to die every year from preventable diseases, while another trillion dollars is misspent on mind-numbing advertising.
Nearly a billion illiterate adults and 325 million children who do not receive schooling are proof of just how far the world is from the most elementary equity and justice.
U.S. imperialism is using war and economic might to impose this system of inequality on the oppressed and working people of the world. It is a class war against all oppressed people and all workers, including those in the United States.
While the billionaire club in the United States grows, millions are facing poverty. Some 46 million people are without health insurance. At the same time, 38 million people, including 14 million children, are living in hunger or on the brink of hunger.
The poor and working people in the United States are sinking deeper into economic misery. In the United States, the richest 20 percent hold 84.4 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 20 percent are in debt—they owe more than they own.
The consequences of people over profit
All of these statistics, and many of them are conservative, reveal the human crisis that is produced when profits are put over people as they are under capitalism. They reveal the human crisis and injustice that are created when the wealth produced by workers does not go to meet the needs of the working class, but instead is stolen and utilized to improve the “well-being” of a tiny minority of enormously rich owners.
You may ask the questions, “Why isn’t the wealth of society being used in a more sensible way? Why do the priorities seem so upside down?” The answer is that under capitalism, like under any other system of exploitation, the interest of the exploiter and the exploited are not compatible. They are irreconcilable.
A billionaire cannot amass a fortune without dispossessing workers of the products of their labor. A class of billionaires, war-makers and colonizers surely cannot keep their booty, their stolen goods, without erecting an enormous military and police apparatus to protect and preserve so much and so blatant inequality.
As Malcolm X said at the Oxford Union in 1964, “If you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. …You’re living in a time of extremism, in a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. …The people in power have misused it, and now there has got to be a change and a better world has got to be built.”
It is on this note that I encourage everyone to learn more about our revolutionary organization and consider getting involved.
