2) Capitalist development entails an increasing concentration and
centralization of capital, such that more and more of the assets and
activity of the capitalist economy on a global scale fall into the hands
of a shrinking fraction of the capitalist class itself. The
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upshot: concentrated wealth at one pole of the world economy; extreme
poverty and misery at the other.
/Commentary and Evidence/
According to the 2019 Wealth-X “The World Ultra Wealth Report,” 265,490
“ultra-high net worth” (uhnw) individuals (with a minimum of $30 million
each in wealth) collectively owned $32.3 trillion in 2018. Expressed
differently, one-quarter of a million oligarchs (roughly equal in number
to the population of Saskatoon, Canada, or Derby, England) owned more
than the poorest 80 percent of the world’s population — some 5.6 billion
people. In North America, 91,740 uhnw individuals held close to $10.9
trillion; in Europe, the uhnw population of 74,380 boasted nearly $8.7
trillion; and in Asia, 75,570 uhnw individuals possessed a combined
wealth of $9.5 trillion. What’s more, in 2017, just 22.3 million people
(about 3.3 percent of the global population), each with a net worth of
over $1 million, owned a combined $91.7 trillion, almost triple the
total wealth of the poorest 90 percent of the world’s population.
In 2016, the anti-poverty group Global Justice Now created a list of the
top one hundred “economic entities” in the world, based on an analysis
of government revenues (reported in the cia’ s /World Factbook, /2016)
and corporate turnover figures (as reported by /Fortune Global 500/).
While the top nine entities were all countries, the Walmart corporation
(the world’s largest non-state employer) placed tenth, just behind
Canada. Overall, there were seventy corporations on the list and just
thirty countries (out of a country total of almost two hundred). This
points to the enormous wealth and power that the biggest transnational
companies in the world command. Global Justice Now said that, together,
the ten biggest corporations — among them, Walmart, Apple and Shell —
make more money than most of the countries in the world combined.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology reported in 2011 that a
dominant core of 147 corporations, via interlocking stakes in others,
together controls 40 percent of the wealth in the global corporate
network, and a total of 737 companies control 80 percent (Mackenzie and
Coghlan 2011). The degree of wealth concentration and monopoly-finance
control over the world economy exercised by several dozen giant
corporations and banks is nothing short of staggering — having reached
levels that far surpass what Lenin documented in his famous work /
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism /a century earlier.
In /Capital I/, Marx wrote: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is,
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therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil
slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite
pole.” Under capitalism, the wealth of the global super-rich derives
from the exploitation of the international working class /as a whole/.
Consider the consequences:
* Half the world’s population lacks access to health care and 100
million people are forced into extreme poverty each year due to health
care expenses (who 2017).
* 1.2 billion people lack access to electricity (Rockefeller
Foundation 2017).
* Two billion people use a drinking water source that is contaminated
with feces (who 2018).
* 8.6 million people die each year due to inadequate health care (Kruk
et al., 2018).
* 750 million adults are illiterate (unesco 2017).
* 1.6 billion people lack access to secure and adequate housing (wri
2017).
* 50.5 million children under the age of five are “wasting” due to
malnutrition (World Bank 2018).
* 850 million people suffer from “chronic undernourishment” (UN Food
and Agriculture Organization, cited in Hunger Notes 2018).
* Four billion people are deprived of internet access (unesdoc 2017).
As Eric London (2018) observes:
Even in the most advanced countries of Europe and North America, the
working class faces increasingly precarious conditions dominated by
declining life expectancy, greater incidences of suicide and drug/
alcohol abuse, growing student debt, declining wages and cuts to social
programs. In the United States, home to roughly one third of the world’s
ultra-wealthy individuals, some 69 percent of people have less than
$1,000 in total savings.
According to a study published by the Institute for Policy Studies, the
annual sales earnings of the world’s two hundred largest corporations
were only slightly less than half the total earned by the poorest 4.5
billion people on Earth in 1997 (Anderson and Cavanagh 2000). By the end
of the twentieth century, two hundred companies accounted for more than
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60 percent of all manufacturing assets in the United States. (In 1929,
that figure had been 46 percent and in 1959, 55 percent.) By 1988, fewer
than 1 percent of all corporations controlled two-thirds of all
corporate assets in the United States. Corporate concentration was even
more pronounced in Canada. By 1987, the top 1 percent of Canadian
companies controlled fully 86 percent of all assets and realized 75
percent of all profits, while the top one-hundredth of 1 percent of all
enterprises (about one hundred companies) controlled 56 percent of all
assets (Blackwell, Smith and Sorenson 2003: 128).
The concentration of assets and profits in the hands of a relatively small
number of huge transnational corporations has dire implications for the
masses of people worldwide who depend on selling their labour power for
a livelihood. While the sales of the top two hundred corporations
account for a quarter to a third of the world’s marketed output, these
corporations employ less than 0.5 percent of the global labour force.
This means that the great majority of the world’s workers must seek
employment with small and medium-sized companies, which are often poorly
capitalized and not nearly as profitable as the top two hundred. Little
wonder, then, that these workers typically endure low wages and meagre
benefits, not to mention deplorable working conditions and job insecurity.
Murray E.G. Smith, Jonah Butovsky, Josh Watterton, Twilight Capitalism: Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit, 2021, pp. 118-20
