Reparative JusticePart 7 of 11 · What capitalism does
Wealth, crisis and reform
A few people grow richer while the rest of us live from one crisis to the next. Reform has not changed this.
The wealth of the few
A new billionaire is created every 26 hours, as inequality contributes to the death of one person every four seconds.
The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their wealth from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion - at a rate of $1.3 billion a day - during the pandemic while the incomes of 99 per cent of humanity have fallen, with over 160 million people forced into poverty and inequality contributing to the death rate.
The world’s top 500 investment management companies manage $119 trillion in elite wealth.
- Private equity firms (comprised of individuals who privately own thousands of corporations and assets themselves) are valued at $4.5 trillion.
- Like all profits, this $123 trillion is idle, unproductive and exponentially growing wealth. $123 trillion is $16,000 shared between every human alive on Earth.
Hedge funds bosses are paid $1 billion a year – that is $4 million a day.
The financial sector are the ultimate owners of thousands of the world biggest and most important corporations around the world including energy, food and agriculture, health and medicines, military, construction etc..
The financial sector is the biggest owners of corporate land and other physical and financial assets.
The financial sector can easily dominate the funding of all major political parties and governments around the world.
The world’s elite are actually overflowing with money they are allowed to legally keep, this makes hunger, homelessness, poverty, destitution and death from them a choice made by governments.
An underclass of impoverished workers is an essential feature of capitalism – a hierarchical oppressive system of divide and rule.
The world’s elite include government employees who are shareholders and investors in financial assets and have an obvious conflict of interest with the majority of the world’s population who must work to live.
Global poverty and inequality are political choices made by protectors of capitalism who legally mandate that everyone must work, mostly in unfulfilling and unnecessary jobs whilst paying tax at a higher rate than the rich who avoid and evade tax through complex financial accounting processes.
Crisis after crisis
Capitalist politicians, policy think tanks, liberal NGOs, academia and media spend vast resources to explain that capitalism brings efficiency, competition, choice, democracy, liberty and freedom if only it were regulated. People are led to believe capitalism is righteous In truth, capitalism rages from one crisis to the next destroying lives and the planet. The cost of living crisis, debt crisis, racist policing crisis, migrant deaths crisis, misogyny crisis, financial crisis, housing crisis, unemployment crisis, wages crisis, food price crisis, climate crisis, inflation crisis, renters crisis, ecological crisis, famine crisis, poverty crisis, mental health crisis, the constant war crisis are not accidents, they are features of capitalism. You cannot have capitalism without racism, sexism, climate change, debt etc. Oppression, subjugation and exploitation that we have constantly fought against, over and over again. We react to them using disorganised, disclocated, unstrategic and weak and even dangerous liberal reformist solutions that moves us 1 step forward and 5 steps back, which means the issues never go away and we repeat the cycle over and over again. Revolutionary Reparations is intended to be our last fight, our last strategic and specific fight for reparative justice and system change.
The myth of reform
Populations are led to believe capitalism can be reformed and justice for enslavement and colonialism can occur within the existing political economic system, including judicial settings and academia.
- This is a myth that comes from conservative and liberal politicians, institutions including academia and the international development sector who encourage the study of enslavement and colonialism at the institutional level
- They encourage the study of reparations for example at the level of a particular corporation, family or country, not a the global political economy level.
- This creates a fetish for endless data, quantification and pontification, that undermine global and interconnected grassroots struggles, who do not need a graph to show their families and environments ravaged by the legacy of enslavement and colonialism - capitalism and destitution it brings.
- Academia, UN programmes and academia who focus on regulating capitalism give capitalism and imperialism credibility which harms the global south and the wage enslaved everywhere.
- They try to “debate” capital and seek to “engage with it”, and find “amicable solutions for change” which are nothing but placid engagements that maintains Capital and the status quo (oppression, subjugation and exploitation).
- Existing estimates of reparations are not systemic – they relate to a specific country or period of time.
- The movement for Revolutionary Reparations calculates the entire spoils of enslavement and colonialism in real time through the wholesale financial and commodity markets. This is a real time value of what they steal from is (the global majority/global waged enslaved) us everyday.