Where are
Marx and Lenin when we need them?
Paul Craig
Roberts
Marx and
Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the
financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution
that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still
predominated over capitalism. In 21st century America capitalism has been
unfettered from the regulations that democratized it and made it serve society.
Today capitalism is being financialized with the consequence that its
productive power is being drained into the service of debt.
When I was
a young man, an individual with one million dollars was very rich. Anyone with
a few millions more was considered richer than rich. Today there are people who
have thousands of millions of dollars.
Few earned
their billions by producing goods and services sold to consumers.
The
neoliberal economists, who prescribe economic policy not only in the West but
also in Russia and China, incorrectly claim that money received is money
earned. In fact, how did the Less-Than-One-Percent really get their thousands
of millions?
They got
them through political connections and through purely financial transactions.
When the
Soviet Union fell apart as a consequence of hardline communists arresting
President Gorbachev, well connected individuals in Russia and the Soviet
province of Ukraine, especially those well connected to Washington and Israel,
ended up with massive holdings that formerly were state properties.
In the US
billionaires result from bank lending for leveraged takeovers of companies. The
takeovers produce riches for the takeover person from curtailing company
pensions and using the company’s cash to pay off the takeover loan. Often the
company and its employees are ruined, but the takeover artist walks away with
massive amounts of money. Manipulation of initial public offerings are another
source of riches as are securitized derivatives.
Classical
economists, and Michael Hudson today, define these profits as “economic rents,”
the income from which required no increase in real output to produce. In other
words, these billionaire wealth gains are a form of parasitism based on
exploitation and not on the production of real output. The gains result from
draining income from production into the service of debt.
Today’s
capitalist economies are far more dysfunctional than Marx supposed. For the
past two decades Western economies have served no one but the very rich, and
the exploited masses have submitted to their exploitation. The Western public
may as well be slaves.
There is no
reason for a person to have thousands of millions of dollars. The money
elevates the political power of individuals over the power of the electorate.
Indeed, the money becomes the electorate. The money is used to purchase
political control, which destroys representative government. Billionaires, such
as Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, and the Koch brothers, use their billionaire
fortunes to control the US government in their interests. A Republican Supreme
Court has made this easier for them.
The rise of
financial power in Russia and China has created private power centers in those
countries that, like the ones in the US, are independent of the governments.
These power centers have the potential to capture the governments and to use
public offices to further concentrate wealth in few hands. Privatizations in
Russia and China will strengthen the independent power of narrow private
interests as they have in Europe and the UK. Neoliberal economics guarantees
that eventaully private money controls the government.
Oxfam, an
international charity headquartered in Oxford, England, reports that 62
billionaires own half of the wealth in the world.
It was
Warren Buffett, one of the richest mega-billionaires, who said that his
secretary’s tax rate was higher than his. If governments do not rectify this,
revolution will.
But
apparently voters won’t, at least not in the US. Hillary represents the One
Percent, as the Clinton’s $153,000,000 in speaking fees attest, but the 99 percent are
self-destructing by voting in support of Hillary’s ambition to gain the
presidency. Apparently, H. L. Mencken was correct, the vast majority of
Americans are morons.
Written by Samuel Harris Friday, 12 February
2016
The latest in a series of annual reports from
Oxfam, detailing the level of economic inequality in our world, is a striking
example of Marx’s prediction that capitalism concentrates wealth in fewer and
fewer hands.
The report, released on January
18th, confirms for many what they already know: the rich are getting richer.
The wealthiest one percent now own more collectively than the remaining
ninety-nine combined. Oxfam had predicted this would become a fact by the
beginning of this year. In fact, it became a reality in 2015.
The absurdity does not end there: the richest
sixty-two billionaires’ wealth has increased by more than $500bn since 2010,
now standing at $1.76 trillion. Despite the total global population growing by
400m in the same period, these sixty-two individuals are as wealthy as half the
world’s population. This is capitalism in all its glory. The rich get richer,
while billions of people struggle to survive on meagre wages and, according to
UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day of poverty.
Oxfam’s report merely puts into words what we
are seeing before our very eyes across the world, namely, dropping living
standards, wages that do not rise with inflation, public sector cuts across the
board, and a squeezing of the working class for everything they’re worth.
Oxfam points out that approximately $7.6
trillion in private wealth is currently held safely in offshore tax havens.
Meanwhile millions of ordinary workers and youth suffer under daily austerity
measures and attacks against living standards.
In 2008, worldwide debt was around $30
trillion. Despite ostensibly imposing austerity on workers across the globe to
reduce this debt, the opposite to what was promised has been achieved. Current
worldwide debt now stands at $55 trillion. Every minute this increases by
millions. With no view to breaking with capitalism and striking at the heart of
the system - the banks and big monopolies - the state inevitably looks to
impose even more austerity on the poorest in society.
What the Oxfam report shows is that in the
midst of deep crisis, the rich continue living their lives of luxury. The poor
are plunged ever deeper into poverty. It is a confirmation of Marx’s prediction
of class polarisation - as capital accumulates in the hands of one class, the
workers are ever exploited, opening an unbridgeable gulf between the two. In
their hunt for profit the capitalists strip the middle classes of their
privileges and reduce them to the same low level as the workers. This process
of concentration of wealth and Capital in the hands of an ever smaller minority
is a part of the Capitalist system and its inherent anarchy.
Oxfam’s reports have been detailing this rise
in inequality for a number of years. It is no wonder they have been threatened
with the removal of their charitable status in a number of countries. In 2010,
388 billionaires owned half the world’s wealth - enough to fill a jumbo jet.
The 2014 report, “Even it Up”, showed that by 2013 that figure had fallen to
eighty-five - enough to fit on a double-decker bus. It is now sixty-two, enough
to be seated comfortably on a single-decker coach. In capital terms these
sixty-two humans are “worth” 3,600,000,000 other humans.
This club of the ultra-rich, on the current
trajectory, will only need to travel by mini-bus by 2020, adding further
savings to their cash-piles. You might well ask, at what point will one person
own as much wealth as half the world?
Oxfam’s statistics and the extreme poverty visible
on the streets of even supposedly wealthy nations show the system is no longer
sustainable. A backlash is becoming evident across the world as waves of
protest movements develop in one country after another.
The solution is clear. The system is preparing
a revolt. We must take our destiny into our own hands. Capitalism no longer
furthers the needs of humanity, and must be swept away. Wipe out global debt by
ending the rule of the banks. Expropriate the sixty-two billionaires, the one
percent, and the banks and monopolies that are the basis of this rotten
capitalist system.
http://www.marxist.com/sixty-two-billionaires-own-half-the-world.htm
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