Inequality

  (From my book "The Cauldron")

 The systematic heart of capitalism.  Wealth creation in a capitalist world is a private business; and human progress is supposed to be dependent on everyone’s desire to get rich.
    If property and income were equally distributed, it would make no difference whether someone described themselves as well-off, of modest means, or poor because such terms would cease to have meaning. To pursue individual wealth, therefore, is to seek inequality.
    Other arrangements for distributing wealth are imaginable, like Marx’s classless  society (government-controlled distribution on the basis of need and entitlement) or Kropotkin’s mutual aid (we help each other and share as necessary); but after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first has been widely discredited while the second has been generally ignored.  Grimelstein thought “only coercion or superhuman powers of persuasion could steer humanity from its addiction to greed,” and dismissed other versions of economic life  as “..romantic illusions, superficially attractive but fundamentally unworkable”. Few would disagree.
    We’re not talking here about natural inequality. That we are born with unequal abilities is a truism too trivial to merit discussion. To complain  because Shakespeare or Tolstoy are better writers than - say -  me is to sit alone, like Anthony "...in the market place, whistling to the air...”
    More than half of humanity, however, lacks sufficient means to secure a healthy diet, let alone buy enough  paper and ink to produce a masterpiece. And since nobody’s managed to come up with a theory of natural economic inequality,  chances are it’s man-made.
    Theft has much to do with it.  Village communities in medieval Europe worked common land and made common wealth. In the sixteenth century, aristocrats decided they needed large estates for themselves and simply threw the peasants out before reemploying them as serfs. “...No longer content to lead lazy, comfortable lives which do no good to society, (the nobles and gentlemen) must actively do it harm by enclosing all the land they can for pasture and leaving none for cultivation,“ objected Thomas More’s hero Rafael Hythloday.  
    Later on, governments got in on the act. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they dispossessed common villagers of their best remaining acreage and awarded that also to the aristocracy. In England, between 1760 and 1844, almost four thousand Enclosure Acts were shoveled through parliament, each designed to legalize a land seizure. Louis the Fourteenth, the great Sun King and flower of French nobility, followed the pattern, allowing communal village property to be confiscated in payment of fabricated debts.  America North and South was likewise built on grand larceny of territory from the people who lived there before the arrival of the Europeans. Ditto Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.
    Sad stories, but the price of progress ... industrialization would never have occurred without enclosure at home, territorial seizure overseas... so run the excuses.
    Let’s pause here for a moment to ask how anyone ever had a legitimate claim to own land. Hugo Grotius, the 17th century Dutch jurist thought God bestowed it on the people for their common use and enjoyment, and that powerful individuals acquired ownership by mutual agreement with the poor. Mutual agreement?  A contemporary, Sir Robert Filmer, spotted the flaw:  why would anybody (including succeeding generations) freely agree to hand over a gift from God to someone else?
    “The first man to enclose a piece of land, claim ownership and find people simple enough to accept what he did was the true founder of civil society,” wrote Rousseau, and then added “How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors would have been avoided if someone had pulled up the fence posts or filled in the ditch and advised his companions to take no notice.”
    Kropotkin pointed out that the price of a house in Paris, which only a rich man could afford, lay not only in the bricks and mortar and the patch of earth on which it stood, but also in the city itself with its roads and sewers and theatres and museums and schools and hospitals all constructed - just like the house - with the sweat and toil of labourers too poor to rent the meanest of its dwellings. Why was it legitimate, therefore, for anyone to own such a property? .
    So much for real estate. Theft of labour, effort and intelligence probably outweighs even that of land in the development of inequality.  Attributing  to one person the work of many allows senior executives to earn salaries of mythic proportions. Yet the administration of even a modest company requires a knowledge of so much detail that one person could hardly begin to retain it. Business and political leaders alike depend on subordinates - preferably ones who are ideologically wedded to their boss’s prejudices.  If the president wants to rough up a competing country - or company - he will order up advice that justifies his wish in the same way that he orders a meal in a restaurant. Even information is served up to suit him. He orders whatever takes his fancy and seldom bothers with the menu. No legendary eastern potentate could command discourse as completely as a chief executive officer. But that’s all he does. The cooking is performed by others - the unremarked operatives who toil in the kitchen for a tenth maybe a hundredth of the CEO’s income.  If all goes well, the boss is applauded; if ill, a few heads roll; if very ill, he will probably sail off into the sunset with a shipload of pension rights, share options and golden handshakes.
    Do leaders deserve such inequality of reward? According to a study by the Chandigarh Institute, the higher the disparity between average company salaries and the pay of the Chief Executive and his cronies, the worse the company’s performance.  Executive compensation, , the study concludes, “possesses one universal characteristic: it advances only in an upward direction and at a faster rate than anyone else’s.”
    Moreover, despite the trumpeted advantages of market economies, “...inequality increases wherever capitalism takes root.” In the United States, the richest five percent control sixty percent of the  wealth - and their share is growing. Half the assets of Latin America are in the hands of one per cent of the people. At the same time, and despite official propaganda to the contrary, social mobility in both regions, and in Europe too, continues to decrease - which means that if you’re born poor chances are you’ll stay poor.
    What do the statistics mean for individuals? Take the film industry. A famous film star recently earned US$5 million for a four-minute advertising slot. Celebrity actors or directors can net tens of millions in a year. Oligarchs, oil barons, hedge-fund managers and hi-tec moghuls can go even higher - with earnings of $100 million and more. That’s more than the annual income of a quarter of a million Haitians, or Ethiopians, or Sudanese, or Nepalese or Madagascans or Bangladeshis; more than the lifetime earnings of 99.99% of the global population; more - 97% more - than  someone on an annual salary of $100,000 will earn in thirty years of work.
    How can individuals - even famous ones - garner such obscene sums? Because we worship at the altar of Mammon, billionaires and media stars are God’s messengers on earth, and their churches charge  inflated entrance fees. We - the flock - make them rich, buying their celebrity and smiling at their condescension, and in return we receive our regular fix of stupefying drivel, grovel at the sound of their name, and vote for them at the polling booth.
     How can we bear to live with such iniquitous nonsense? Might just as well ask how we can bear to live with ourselves.