Mind The Gap

Oxfam International produces a yearly report that goes viral each and every year. One stat from that report specifically is responsible for much outrage and debate, and it's represented in the famous quote "the top X people have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half."

_{Image by risastla - source: Flickr}

In January it was reported that 2018 X was 26; the 26 richest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom 3.8 billion, the poorest half of the world. Now first, this number has been under heavy scrutiny every year and there are some very valid criticisms to make. The biggest one is that there's a lot of Americans and Europeans in the absolute bottom of the wealth distribution numbers, because they have negative wealth; students with huge student loans for example, or shady business men with a lot of outstanding debts, or individuals with heavy credit-card debts. There's hundreds of millions of these, but they can hardly be seen as poor. Even correcting for valid criticisms though, the number of billionaires that own more that the bottom half of the world population still doesn't rise above 147; the conclusion is still the same and it's that wealth inequality is still rising. It's still a problem and, if I'm honest, immoral.

What's also debatable in Oxfam's conclusions is that the poor are getting poorer; the excuse that's usually given to justify the gap between rich and poor growing year by year, is that in capitalism even the poor rise on the miracle of perpetual growth that is our shared pie. As far as I can oversee and comprehend, there's just no way really to answer if the poor are getting poorer, if only because it's much harder to get data on the poorest among us. What's clear however is that the richest few keep raking in the lion's share of all newly created wealth, and that the gap is growing steadily. Here's an article on the criticisms: Are 26 billionaires worth more than half the planet? The debate, explained.

This endless growth of the inequality gap is responsible for much of the unrest in the world; there will come a moment that the 99% won't take it anymore and we'll see whatever is the equivalent of pitchforks when we see it. But there's so many other ways to solve this, and it amazes me how little incentive there is to implement the simplest solutions. One solution is to respect the libertarian wish to avoid high taxes, a fixed maximum and a fixed minimum wage. Well, that's no problem, at least if we can agree on the basic and real problem; the growing gap that goes viral every year. If we can agree that the problem is not that some people are richer than other people, but that the problem is that this gap naturally seems to grow wider and wider to the point it becomes unexplainable, then we should be able to agree on a maximum gap between the richest and the poorest people within our societies. No fixed minimum and no fixed maximum, only a fixed limit to the reasonably permissible gap between the extremes. That way we ensure that all are lifted on the rising tide of growing profits. Complaints from the right about "involuntary redistribution" of their wealth through taxes can be avoided by not distributing wealth unfairly to begin with.

_{Wealth inequality is literally killing us. The economy should work for everyone. | Alissa Quart}

This is not rocket science, and I'm not the one to come up with this idea, it's so simple. But this will never even be proposed. Not because it couldn't be implemented, but because it goes against the ideology's objective; capitalism is designed to grow inequality, designed to keep intact a privileged upper class, designed to concentrate wealth into the hands of a select few. Don't you find it strange that we say we live in a democracy, but we only get one third of that democracy? What I mean is that, generalizing and roughly speaking, the average person works a job for a living; you go to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. A lot of the other hours you spend preparing to go to work, resting from that work, forgetting the that work in the bar on the way home and asleep in bed. Most of your productive hours, the best hours of the day, and the best years of your life you spend for and in a place that that's the opposite of a democracy. And we've been raised to think this is normal, that this is how it's supposed to be.

But it's not. If we introduce democracy in the place we spend most of our best years and hours, something miraculous happens. Now there's a board of shareholders who have the right to vote in a board of directors for any large company, on average a group of 12 people. The voting works as follows: 1 share equals 1 vote. Of the shareholders, the billionaires among the multi-millionaires, 1% owns two thirds of the shares; this is the actual and famous 1%. They have disproportionately large influence when choosing who the CEO, CFO and so on of these companies are, and they have one assignment only: increase the value of the shares, increase the value of the income of those who are richest already. They decide, with that one assignment in mind, what to produce, how much to produce, where to produce (can we produce cheaper in another country? are there countries with easy to control, highly centralized governments with almost no environmental laws?), and last but not least, what to do with the profits. These are the people who are "stealing your jobs." This mechanism is the sole driver behind the perpetually growing gap between the extremes of income distribution.

Now what if not shareholders, but the ones really responsible for the creation of wealth, the workers that spend their lifes there. What if we simply extend democracy to the place we spend most of our time? A decision to move the factory to Bangladesh or not would be made in mere seconds; of course we're not going to move our own jobs! If there's a choice to be made about environmental pollution, you bet the most environmental friendly solution would ALWAYS be made; they have to live in their own waste. As do their kids and grandparents. Do you think workers would vote for the upper management to be paid 300 times more than the average worker? Never. There would be differences for sure, differences in pay and differences in levels of responsibility, but not the 300 times more which is what's the norm now. This type of organizing, of democratizing the workplace, is called a worker cooperative and has been done many times and very successfully. We just never hear about it, because this is basically socialism, that's all socialism amounts to; giving the means of production in the hands of the ones who do the producing. It's not about heavy government regulation, it's not about the government at all.

There you are, a very simple and straightforward way by agreeing on a maximum gap between the richest and poorest, or a more enduring, complete and radical way by democratizing the workplace. It's not difficult and it is in my mind an outrage that we still need this stat to go viral every year. And that this lasts a couple of days only, weeks maybe, but than forgotten until the next year; a remarkable gap in our collective attention-span concerning the main problem we face as world societies. That's why I'm here, halfway through to the next Oxfam report, to remind you: mind the gap!

_{Richard Wolff: "Worker Cooperatives: Movements for Social Change and Personal Empowerment" - 1 of 2}

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