David Ruccio and Jamie Morgan — Capital and class: inequality after the crash

by
Mike Norman
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The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even more unequal.

Those in the small group at the top have long been able to put distance between themselves and everyone else preciselybecause they’ve been able to capture the surplus and then convert their share of the surplus into ownership of wealth. And the returns on their wealth allow them to capture even more of the surplus produced within global capitalism. This is accompanied by growing income inequality.

However, although people are aware of inequality, they are typically unaware of its real extent, and mainstream economics and the popular press contribute to this situation, which in turn leads to the reproduction of the system that produces ever-more-grotesque levels of inequality.

Both class and ideology underpin this worsening situation. The tiny group at the top, both nationally and globally, have both an interest and the means to maintain the economic and social rules and institutions that allow them to capture the surplus, and thus create more distance between themselves and everyone else. Meantime, mainstream economic and political discourses, inside and outside the academy, tend to ignore the class conditions and consequences of inequality – and to undermine the possibility of a real debate about the kinds of changes that are necessary to give the majority of people a say in how the surplus is utilized....