The world is rich. The problem is the rich control the world.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme 444, retired

We hear day in day out about the massive poverty and hunger that exists in the world. NGO’s and various non-profits have been around for decades appealing for assistance in feeding the world’s poor.  In the third world, water is as precious as gold.  Sewage and water sources run parallel in the streets due to the lack of modern infrastructure systems.

More often than not, the experts in the universities and think tanks of the 1% drag the age-old Malthusian explanation out of the closet.  There is simply an overpopulation problem. It is the poor that are to blame, if only they’d have fewer children.

But as I have pointed out in previous blogs, it is not too many people that are the problem.  It is not the lack of medical knowledge or technical expertise that leads to staggering infant and adult death rates in some parts of the world. It is the lack of social infrastructure and the capital needed to provide it.

The world produces enough food to feed everyone according to Hunger Notes.org 17% more calories today than it did 30 years ago.  But food is a commodity and its production does not take place if the end product cannot be bought and the value added during the production process realized.  The capitalist class would call this lack of demand. But in the world of the market, if you can’t pay you can’t play. No money for food, then you starve. This is the absurdity of capitalism that Marx wrote about, that we starve amid plenty. He wrote in 1848:

“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

Unicef estimates that between 2000 and 2010 92 million children died form hunger and diseases, “…many of the illnesses and conditions that children suffer are easily preventable, technically.”  says Global Issues, in other words, they are really what we might refer to as “man made” deaths.  They are in actuality, market induced deaths. Almost 2 million children a year die form diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water, another market induced crisis with which even the UN seems to agree:

“We reject this [Malthusian perspective that global water problems are a problem of scarcity and population growth]. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.” (2006 UN Human Development Report P. 2)

The cost of bringing people safe water is negligible when compared to the concentration of wealth.  “The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).” says the World Bank.  The world’s richest, Business Week claims, have a collective net worth of $2.8 trillion.  Either way you measure it, there is plenty of money in the world. These characters spend half their time hiding this wealth to protect it, form ex-wives, estranged children and the rest of us. But how do they get it?

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is squabbling with his wife over a $9 billion nest egg

Dmitry Rybolovlev

and who has his cash stashed all over the world, made most of his money (including $500 million in art, $36 million in Jewelry and an $80 million yacht) “…from the sale of two potash fertilizer companies for a combined $8 billion…” Business Week adds.

But how did he come to own these huge operations; and in such a short period?  It’s quite simple really and one of the reasons Gorbachev was so popular with the B movie actor and US president Ronald Reagan and the global 1%. Gorbachev was a former leading Stalinist bureaucrat.  He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the period when one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in history began to draw its last breath and collapse under its own bureaucratic weight.

Gorbachev and his old buddies including many former KGB thugs like Putin who reached the ranks of Lieutenant Colonel, wasn’t about to go down with the sinking ship. What happened in a nutshell, and why we see so many prominent Russian millionaires and billionaires is that the old KGB and moribund party men appropriated the collective and collectivized  wealth of the Soviet and Russian people.  The US capitalist class welcomed the plunder and their former KGB credentials were a thing of the past as long as capitalism could flourish.  That’s where Rybolovlev and other Russians like him got their wealth.

No doubt readers are getting a bit bored with it but there is a need to hammer it home to counter the propaganda of the world’s bourgeois that there is not enough money to feed, clothe, house and provide humanity with a decent and productive life. I am talking about the claim by the Tax Justice Network that wealthy individuals, (we’re not talking corporations here) stashed as much as$32 trillion in offshore accounts in 2010 in order to avoid taxes.  This amounts to the combined GDP of the U S and Japan. “Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets..”  BW claims.  This exists as more than 9 million people die worldwide each year because of hunger and malnutrition; 5 million of them are children.

This situation is not something that cannot change.  It is not an insoluble dilemma. It is not the fault of the victims, of  “human greed” in the abstract or of “natural disasters” or the by-product of supernatural squabbling between a benign god and his disgruntled fallen angel. It is a very simple; the Russian billionaires for example attained their rapid billionaire status simply through the transfer of the collective wealth of society to individuals including the means for generating that wealth.  We solve the problem by transferring collective wealth, and more importantly, the means by which it is created, the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, from private individuals to the collective.

Through this process, we can emerge from the depths of depravity to the apex of civilization.  True freedom.