“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
If you are one of the world’s billionaires who have seen your wealth increase by $3.9 trillion in 2020, it is the best of times. Their total wealth now stands at $11.95 trillion. The world’s ten richest billionaires alone have seen their wealth increase by $540 billion in 2020.
If you are one of the 500 million who have been added to the ranks of those living in poverty, it is the worst of times. According to the Oxfam report, The Inequality Virus, this is the first time since records have been kept that inequality increased in virtually every country on Earth at the same time.
We are in deep crisis, a crisis exacerbated, accelerated, and intensified by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is a crisis that has been forty years in the making. For forty years, the richest one percent have earned more than the income of the bottom half. Nearly half of humanity has been forced to live on less than $5.50 a day.
In this sense, “back to normal” is no option. It can only mean the continuation of the crisis that has been underway for some time. The capitalist private property system has always been a system that extracts the maximum profit from the exploitation and suppression of the majority of the world’s peoples. Dickens’ classic of the French Revolution Tale of Two Cities attests to that.
What is new about the past sixty years or so is that in the drive to maximize profits, the capitalists are always introducing more and more advanced technology. Now they have incorporated a technology that is like no other – the new electronic, digital, automated technology is a laborless technology. It means production without human labor.
Capitalism is a wage-labor system. Production without human labor spells the death-knell of the capitalist private property system. This is at bottom the basis of the global crisis we are experiencing today. The real basis of the extreme inequality we are experiencing today is that the workers of the world cannot compete with the robot.
COVID-19 is the inequality virus. The vaccines produced by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies are commodities driven by the law of the maximization of private profit and distributed in the world market according to those who are able to pay. Consequently, in the high-income countries, more than one in four have already been vaccinated, and here in our country, as many as seventy percent could be vaccinated by July 4. In low-income countries, the percentage is one in five hundred.
In what the World Health Organization describes as a “catastrophic moral failure,” the horrific polarization of wealth and poverty on a global scale is unveiled. Seventy-five percent of all vaccines have gone to ten countries. In all of Africa, the number is less than one percent. In Namibia – less than .1 per cent; in Egypt – .1 percent; in Nigeria – .5 percent; in Pakistan – .8 percent. Even in some European countries – Spain, Italy, France, Germany – the vaccination rate is less than seven percent.
What we have described here may paint a dark picture of our times, of the depths of our crisis, but it also heralds the spring of hope, the opening up of new possibilities, new ideas. Inequality lies at the very heart of almost every obstacle we encounter, but that itself calls forth the fundamental yearning of the exploited and oppressed peoples of the Earth for real and material equality, equality based on the distribution of all that every one of us needs in order to obtain a fully human life. The fight to secure the basic necessities of life is already underway. We see that in every struggle to defeat hunger, for housing for all, for education, and for every basic need, including the necessity to reclaim and restore the health of the Earth itself.
We know that real, material equality can never be obtained within the confines of a system which is the very cause of inequality itself. Society must be reconstructed on an entirely new basis, in which material human equality is built-in. This is the direction in which our revolution today is heading. The light of a new day is coming into our view.
Published: June 9, 2021
This article published by Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction
