The Black Commentator - Along The Color Line: Global Inequality and Class Conflict

“Along The Color Line”, written by Manning Marable, PhD and distributed by www.BlackCommentator.com, is a public educational and information service dedicated to fostering political dialogue and discussion, inspired by the great tradition for political event columns written by W. E. B. Du Bois nearly a century ago.

At no previous moment in world history has the gap between the rich and poor been as wide as today. As an important, newly-released report reveals, this growing class divide exists in virtually every nation on earth.

A 2006 study by the World Institute for Development Economic Research of the United Nations University, establishes that as of 2000, the upper 1 percent of the globe’s adult population, approximately 37 million people, who average about $515,000 in net worth per person, collectively control roughly 40 percent of the world’s entire wealth. By contrast, the bottom one-half of the planet’s adult population, 1.85 billion people, most of whom are black and brown, own only 1.1 percent of the world’s total wealth. There is tremendous inequality of wealth between nations, the U.N. report notes. The United States, for example, comprises only 4.7 percent of the world’s people, but it has nearly one-third, or 32.6 percent, of global wealth. By stark contrast, China, which has one-fifth of the world’s population, owns only 2.6 percent of the globe’s wealth. India, which has 16.8 percent of the global population, controls only 0.9 percent of the world’s total wealth.

Within most of the world’s countries, wealth is disproportionately concentrated in the top ten percent of each nation’s population. It comes as no surprise that in the United States, for example, the upper 10 percent of the adult population owns 69.8 percent of the nation’s total wealth. Canada, a nation with more liberal social welfare traditions than the U.S., nevertheless still exhibits significant inequality. More than one-half of Canadian assets, 53 percent, are owned by only ten percent of the population. European countries such as Norway, at 50.5 percent, and Spain, at 41.9 percent, have similar or slightly lower levels of wealth inequality.

The most revealing finding of the World Institute for Development Economics Research is that similar patterns of wealth inequality now exist throughout the Third World. In Indonesia, for example, 65.4 percent of the nation’s total wealth belongs to the wealthiest 10 percent. In India, the upper ten percent owns 52 percent of all Indian wealth. Even in China, where the ruling Communist Party still maintains vestiges of what might be described as “authoritarian state socialism,” the wealthiest 10 percent own 41.4 percent of the national wealth.

But even these macroeconomic statistics, as useful as they are, obscure a crucial dimension of wealth concentration, under global apartheid’s neoliberal economics. In the past 20 years in the United States, where deregulation and privatization has been carried to extremes, we are witnessing a phenomenon that the media has described as “the very rich” leaving “the merely rich" behind. A recent study by New York University economist Edward N. Wolff has found that one out of every 825 households in the U.S. in 2004 earned at least $2 million annually, representing nearly a 100 percent increase in the wealth percentage recorded in 1989, adjusted for inflation. As of 2004, one out of every 325 U.S. households possessed a net wealth of $10 million or more. When adjusted by inflation, this is more than four times as many wealthy households as in 1989. The exponential growth of America’s “super-rich” is a direct product of the near-elimination of capital gains taxes, and the sharp decline in federal government income tax rates.

We still tend to perceive the political world in eighteenth and nineteenth century terms: as competing “nations,” geopolitical units defined by territorial boundaries, which conduct international affairs based on their perceived objective interests. In the twenty-first century, however, we must perceive of our political world entirely differently: as an environment in which multinational corporations exert greater power and influence than many countries; where millions of low-wage, manufacturing jobs each year are being relocated to south Asia, China, and Latin America. Globalization, and the widespread adoption of the neoliberal economic model of development, are constructing an affluent, transnational “ruling class,” a privileged stratum whose class interests largely supercede its national allegiances.

SOURCES:

“Jamaica Today: The Legacy of Michael Morley”

Thomas Edsall, “Risk and Reward,” New York Times, 5 December 2006.

Eduardo Porter, “Study Finds Wealth Inequality is Widening Worldwide,” New York Times, 6 December, 2006.

Louis Uchitelle, “Very Rich are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind,” New York Times, 27 November 2006.

Douglas W. Payne, “In Jamaica, Hero Day is Done,” Dissent, Vol. 45, no. 3 (Summer 1998) pp. 24-26.

Fred Magdoff, “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation,” Monthly Review, Vol. 58, no. 6 (November 2006), pp. 1-23.

The Editors, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,” Monthly Review, Vol. 53, no. 10 (March 2002), pp. 1-14.

In 1976, at the age of 26, Manning Marable began a syndicated public affairs series “Along The Color Line”, focusing on political issues and public events that had special significance to African Americans and to other people of color internationally. For more than 25 years, the column was distributed regularly free-of-charge to over 400 newspapers worldwide. Medical problems forced the temporary halt to the distribution of “Along The Color Line”. BC and Dr. Marable are pleased to announce the return of the “Along The Color Line” public affairs series, beginning in 2007. The series is still absolutely without charge to all black-owned, black-oriented, and independent/progressive publications and internet websites for distribution worldwide. You are completely free to reproduce any one column, or all of them, that you see published on BlackCommentator.com so long as credit is given to Dr. Marable and www.BlackCommentator.com.

BC Editorial Board member Manning Marable, PhD is one of America’s most influential and widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to 2003. Dr. Marable is an author or editor of over 20 books, including Living Black History (2006); The Autobiography of Medgar Evers (2005); Freedom (2002); Black Leadership (1998); Beyond Black and White (1995); and How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983). His current project is a major biography of Malcolm X, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, to be published by Viking Press in 2009. Click here to contact Dr. Marable.