Workers Solidarity Movement

There is something fundamentally wrong with this system when 80 people can have the same amount of wealth as what 3.6 billion people have between them. The figures from Oxfam’s latest report show that the rich really are getting richer and that the poor are getting poorer.

There are many factors we can attribute to this trend; globalization, out-sourcing, the breaking of labour power through the breaking of the unions in the Reagan-Thatcher era that labour never recovered from. Ultimately it falls down to the growing strength of capitalism and therefore the growing strength of the other harmful power structures that it has to support it. Included in these is racism, cheap labour from immigrants or as in many cases slave labour, as well as sexism, with gender being the division of labour. Both of these things, racism and sexism (to name only a few) come from policies implemented at the top of society that are targeted at the rest of us.
 

If we take a look at these 80 people, 70 of them are men and the majority are from western, white-supremacist countries. Countries like the USA, Germany, France, Italy etc. Conversely, if we take a look at where the poorest live they are countries like India, China, Nigeria, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, the racist element creeps into it, that the majority of the people in these countries are non-white and are perceived to be backward – owing to the fact that capitalist ideology equates wagelessness and low technological development with political backwardness, lack of power, and a yearning of these people for capital and big business to come and save them from their underdeveloped and unsophisticated state.

There is nothing to suggest that this is the peak of this growing trend. Despite us being fed the line by the media that our economic system is in crisis, the elites of our society know nothing of it. It is us who are paying for the greed and recklessness of a few while they continue to make a profit from our suffering.