Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by Harvey David

Author:Harvey, David [Harvey, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last thirty years inequality has grown dramatically in many countries. In the US the share of national income going to the top 1% has doubled since 1980 from 10 to 20%. For the top 0.01% it has quadrupled to levels never seen before. At the global level, the top 1% (60 million people) and particularly for the more select few in the top 0.01% (600,000 individuals – there are around 1200 billionaires in the world) the last thirty years has been an incredible feeding frenzy. This is not confined to the US, or indeed to the rich countries. In the UK inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China, the top 10% now take home nearly 60% of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, [the most unequal country on earth, where incomes are] significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid. Even in many of the poorest countries, inequality has grown rapidly. Globally the incomes of the top 1% have increased 60% in twenty years. The growth in income for the top 0.01% has been even greater.

The crisis of 2007–9 onwards made matters worse: ‘The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012 – enough to end world poverty four times over.’2 Billionaires have erupted all over the place, with large numbers now recorded in Russia, India, China, Brazil and Mexico, as well as in the more traditionally wealthy countries in North America, Europe and Japan. One of the more significant shifts is that the ambitious no longer have to migrate to the affluent countries to become billionaires – they can simply stay at home in India (where the number of billionaires has more than doubled over the last few years), Indonesia or wherever. As Branko Milanovic concludes, we are witnessing the rise of a global plutocracy in which global power ‘is held by a relatively small number of very rich people’.3 The threat to the contradictory unity between production and realisation in the global economy is palpable.

Yet by other measures the world is a much more equal place than it once was. Millions of people have escaped from poverty. Much of this has been due to the phenomenal growth of China, along with substantial bursts of growth in the other so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia and India). Disparities in the global distribution of wealth and income between countries have been much reduced with rising per capita incomes in many developing parts of the world. The net drain of wealth from East to West that had prevailed for over two centuries has been reversed as East Asia in particular has risen to prominence as a powerhouse in the global economy. The recovery of the global economy (anaemic though it was) from the traumas of 2007–9 had largely been based by 2013 on the rapid expansions in so-called ‘emerging’ markets (mainly the BRIC countries). This shift had even extended to

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