“Legalized chattel slavery did not die out because it was an abhorrent system but because the system of wage labour and debt money offered a more effective and useful economy of power for dominant owners,” explains Tim Di Muzio, senior lecturer in international relations and political economy at Wollongong University in Australia, in ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership’.
He further states that “The market and price system were imposed on humanity not as a matrix of choice but as a mechanism of domination.”
Di Muzio reveals that the 12 million high net worth individuals (HNWIs) on a global scale represent 0.2% of the population. the top ten percent own 85 percent of the world’s wealth, the bottom 50 percent scarcely one percent. The 1%-ers have almost 40 times more than the bottom 50 percent. The goal of capitalists is differential accumulation – to primarily increase the wealth gap between themselves and others: i.e., they seek greater wealth inequality. At the corporate level, the goal is the same: to gain a larger share of the wealth pie than competitors. For this reason, the capitalist system cannot rid wealth inequality or significantly reduce the inequality. Di Muzio writes: “this addiction for wealth and power is destroying the planet for future generations.”
Stock markets “largely serve as the state-protected markets by which dominant owners organise and redistribute ownership claims to money and power.” Real estate; commodity and derivatives market; the foreign exchange market whose “gradual emergence … has facilitated the transnationalisation of dominant ownership and the capitalisation of power”
Di Muzio cites a principle of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau holds that “no one should be allowed to appropriate the labor of others or be forced to alienate his own” to argue that intellectual property is held to be baseless since “anyone who creates a new invention or stumbles upon a new discovery owes an unpayable debt to the communities of the past and present.” This refutes the superman theory of wealth creation. Moreover: “Dominant owners are not rich because of special talents or superhuman traits but because they own income-generating assets that do not come from their labour.”
Solidarity is a must Di Muzio advocates, “… as long as the 99% remain fragmented and disorganized, the 1% will continue to rule by advancing their interests in accumulating more symbolic power.”
We could take issue with the overly emphasis on the banking/financial sector of capitalism but fo this purpose of this blog post it would distract from the books many valid observations
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