World's eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%

 The world’s eight richest billionaires control the same wealth between them as the poorest half of the globe’s population, according to a charity warning of an ever-increasing and dangerous concentration of wealth.

  In a report published to coincide with the start of the week-long World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam said it was “beyond grotesque” that a handful of rich men headed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth $426bn (£350bn), equivalent to the wealth of 3.6 billion people.

  The development charity called for a new economic model to reverse an inequality trend that it said helped to explain Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

  Oxfam blamed rising inequality on aggressive wage restraint, tax dodging and the squeezing of producers by companies, adding that businesses were too focused on delivering ever-higher returns to wealthy owners and top executives.

But this is normal capitalist accumulative behaviour.

 It is no accident, nor is it capitalism going out of synch. it ever was the business of capitalism to ,"Accumulate ,Accumulate" as Marx said.

'Twas ever thus.
“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” ― Voltaire


 The World Economic Forum (WEF) said last week that rising inequality and social polarisation posed two of the biggest risks to the global economy in 2017 and could result in the rolling back of globalisation.

  Oxfam said the world’s poorest 50% owned the same in assets as the $426bn owned by a group headed by Gates, Amancio Ortega, the founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara, and Warren Buffett, the renowned investor and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

  The others are Carlos Slim Helú: the Mexican telecoms tycoon and owner of conglomerate Grupo Carso; Jeff Bezos: the founder of Amazon; Mark Zuckerberg: the founder of Facebook; Larry Ellison, chief executive of US tech firm Oracle; and Michael Bloomberg; a former mayor of New York and founder and owner of the Bloomberg news and financial information service.

  Last year, Oxfam said the world’s 62 richest billionaires were as wealthy as half the world’s population. However, the number has dropped to eight in 2017 because new information shows that poverty in China and India is worse than previously thought, making the bottom 50% even worse off and widening the gap between rich and poor.

 Oxfam called for fundamental change to ensure that economies worked for everyone, not just “a privileged few”.


 But the fundamental change they wish to see does not address the problem in any fundamental way. It merely exhorts the parasite class of capitalists to redistribute some more of their wealth and does not ask any questions of where this wealth comes from or is derived in the first instance.

  The society of today is a capitalist society and the classes that face one another are the capitalist class and the working class. The form of bondage is different from the forms that prevailed formerly, but it is still bondage.

  The wealth producers of today are not bound to a lord or master as were the serfs and slaves. They may refuse their services to this or that capitalist. But they cannot escape from the capitalist class. They must deliver their abilities to some member or members of that class. In no other way do they have access to the things needed to preserve life.


 When they do this,in return for a rationed access to the wealth which the workers produce in the form of wages, they create a surplus store of wealth for the capitalist class.


 All wealth then comes from the working class.

  And in spite of the often repeated claim in various circles that the classes of today have mutual and harmonious interests, the facts show a struggle between these classes as grim as any that preceded it.

 From the beginning of the existing form of society down to the present day there has been a never-ending conflict between the capitalists and the workers: on the part of the capitalists to squeeze every possible ounce of energy from the workers at the lowest possible cost; on the part of the workers to check these efforts and to try in turn to gain bearable living and working conditions for themselves.

 Workers of the world exist in a disadvantaged economic capacity as a part of the world's working class, whether by hand or by brain, even if they are bosses or schoolteachers.


 They have more in common with each other globally, than with the capitalist class in the country they live in.

 Workers also run capitalism from top to bottom.


 A fundamental change is indeed the answer to inequality and poverty, but this has to remove the source of that impoverishment.


 The capitalist class used to be the revolutionary class with a number of kings heads as well as a Tsar to show for their Jacobinist opportunism.

  The tremendous success of capitalism in creating the technological means and the educated mass (90-95%) to run its productive and distributive and even coercive governance capacity, allied with representative democracy, its Achilles heel, makes possible its supercedence of capitalism by a post-capitalist, delegatory, democratic, production for use, free access ,world commonwealth of comparative superabundance.

  It is in the interests of 'everyone' that we end war and poverty, along with the wasteful despoliation of the planet, its resources, seas , land and even the air we breathe.

 But we are not addressing 'everyone'. We are only addressing the potential revolutionary class who will make this happen in their own class interests. The 90-95% working class. The fact of it benefitting all, will eventually percolate across class boundaries.

In the face of this politically conscious majority revolution, resistance would be foolish and futile.

Nothing will stop an idea which time has come.

"From each according ot their ability to each according to their needs"