This logic of expansion and conquest undoubtedly changes the relationship between humans and their environment. In this context, the “debate” over climate change actually becomes a matter of human survival. Those who entertain climate change as a question at all have already, maybe unknowingly, chosen a side. The fact is that climate change will create more refugees and forced human migrations; it will lead to the murder of environmental activists around the world and start new resource wars; it will spread disease and destabilize everything in its path — and more. Unless capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for natural resources and the fossil fuel combustion that powers it is abandoned, the Earth will be forced to do away with humans cancerously plundering the carbon energy it has stored over millions of years of natural history.

What is most unfortunate is that capitalism, which has multi-layered discriminations encoded within it — racism, sexism, classism, and so on — affects how thoroughly people are capable of bracing for the damages wrought by climate change. Though nature is indiscriminate in its wrath, the sustained ability to protect oneself from rising temperatures and natural disasters is a privilege not all can afford. Those who are already harmed under the pitiless whims of capital are doubly hurt by the lack of protection afforded to them for life in an increasingly turbulent environment. The Global South is much more likely to feel the brunt of climate change, despite contributing much less to causing it. But even in the world’s wealthiest nations, the poor and working classes are much more vulnerable to ecological devastation.

If the people who understand the gravity of the situation want this state of affairs to cease, then the system of capitalism and the egregious consumption of the so-called First World itself must cease. That which puts all of us at risk cannot be tolerated. The vast satisfactions in wealth hoarded by a few does not outweigh the needs of the many suffering the consequences every day, as the Earth deals with malignant human behavior. The systemic drive towards excess that is pushing the planet’s carrying capacity to the brink must be brought to a halt throughout the world, but especially in the empire that exemplifies excess best: the United States of America.

The Myth of “The Nanny State”

Ever since Donald Trump became president, crisis and disarray have been regular in an extraordinary sense. Not that the United States hasn’t always been this way; it has been for many of those oppressed within this society. But the dramatic events unfolding today have been very confronting for those who are only now realizing that progress — or the things that represent it symbolically — can be done away with overnight.

In the midst of an onslaught of draconian far-right legislation, the liberal establishment has failed to muster a convincing rebuff. This is due in part to complicity in the shift towards the right, and in part due to a more general crisis of confidence within liberalism. But what is also failing today is the state itself. At a time when environmental, social and economic crises are running out of control amid authoritarian overreach, the state seems to be in a moment of purposeful neglect and disarray. This is leading people to take the response to the confluence of crises into their own hands, raising the question of the state’s raison d’être to begin with.

When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he said that President Trump’s choices for his cabinet would be aimed at “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon suggested that the primary goal should be to limit the regulatory agencies and bureaucratic entities getting in the way of the administration’s self-styled economic nationalism. “The way the progressive left runs,” Bannon went on to say, “is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” Years before this, in 2013, he had already told a writer for the Daily Beast that “I’m a Leninist … Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Without overemphasizing the irony and jocular misleadingness of the latter self-comparison, Bannon does raise a key question for the far right: what’s the use in a state? While such a question could potentially be put to progressive use in some hands, it is definitely dangerous in these. For the right, the question of the state’s usefulness is answered by the assertion of dominance and the infliction of violence — something that is clearly distressing for those of us resisting oppression. But at the same time, right-wing propaganda and talking points also depict the state as a “nanny state,” or an overprotective manifestation of liberal charity. Clearly, this characterization is as stale as it is untrue. The very idea that liberalism itself is charitable is a blatant falsification, yet the far right continues to disseminate this myth in its unending desire to maximize the state’s fascistic potential while depriving it of its limited welfare functions.

Austerity measures — something the world has become all too familiar with in recent years —provide us with the brutal confirmation that we never actually needed to dispel the far right’s propagandistic falsehoods. As governments around the world cut back on services, regulations and agencies that are meant to benefit social welfare and the public good, the trope of overzealous liberal government is shown to be untrue. Austerity threatens to undermine the very things that are supposed to make societies peaceable. But as consistently seems to happen in a world dominated by capitalism, those who are most vulnerable bear the brunt.

Dismantling Progress and Protection

In 2016, Oxfam announced that world’s 62 richest billionaires held as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. In 2017, this number decreased significantly to just eight people because new information came to light showing that poverty in China and India are much worse than previously thought, widening the gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the bottom 50 percent. While this information is certainly beyond troubling, capitalism largely continues its path of destruction without being disturbed itself.

A slew of hurricanes hitting the Caribbean in 2017 made the world pause to consider the dangers of climate chaos. Many of the conversations that took place as a result of the back-to-back destruction wrought by hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria focused on the threat of a disturbed environment. Under President Trump, these threats are only further exacerbated. As someone who campaigned on rejuvenating the coal industry and who has actively worked to transform climate denialist sentiments into government policy, Trump is one of the worst presidents anyone could hope for at a time of pressing climate disaster. With regard to the aforementioned “deconstruction” of the regulatory state that Banon spoke of, Trump accomplished major strides at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Under the regressive guidance of Scott Pruitt, a long-time fossil fuel defender, the EPA has seen absurd government moves to destabilize the very purposes of the agency itself in favor of corporate interests.

Pruitt built his career off of suing the EPA as attorney general for the state of Oklahoma. Under Trump, he can now secure his ultimate favor to corporate interests by dismantling the state agency altogether. Everything is up for grabs and the agency has become increasingly secretive about its agenda. The New York Times reported complaints of career EPA employees working under Pruitt, explaining that “they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is,” as well as doors being “frequently locked.” It has even been said that “employees have to have an escort to gain entrance” to Mr. Pruitt’s quarters, as well as some being told not bring cell phones or take notes in meetings. The Washington Post recently reported that the EPA spent almost $25,000.00 to soundproof his work area. For a state agency tasked with protecting the environment, the actions being carried out sound more in line with that of federal law enforcement or intelligence at the FBI or CIA.

The example of Pruitt is one of many hinting at an increasingly restructured state, in which right-wing corporate forces that once fought regulation now become the regulator themselves, showing how the will of capital will always fulfill itself in this system. At the same time, as the trifecta of terrible storms hit the Caribbean and the Southern US coastline, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) displayed a similar lack of social concern. In response to the lackluster response of the authorities, local communities were left to fend for themselves, with only a few celebrity figures tasking themselves with taking action. At a very emotional press conference, Mayor Carmen Cruz of San Juan compared the neglect taking place to genocide and shed tears demanding more help for US citizens in Puerto Rico: “we are dying here. And I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot figure out logistics for a small island of 100 miles by 35 miles long.”

A U.S. flag hangs in front of a burning structure in Black Forest, Colo., June 12, 2013. The structure was among 360 homes that were destroyed in the first two days of the fire, which had spread to 15,000 acres by June 13. The Black Forest Fire started June 11, 2013, northeast of Colorado Springs, Colo., burning scores of homes and forcing large-scale evacuations. The Colorado National Guard and U.S. Air Force Reserve assisted in firefighting efforts. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, U.S. Air Force/Released)

Citizenship, expectation and failure

The emphasis on Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the other storms often gives special attention to their Americanness. Despite the fact that the entire Caribbean was hit, the question is why US citizens would be neglected in this way. The logic of American exceptionalism should render everyone within the nation’s borders and territories — or colonies — special due to their citizenship within the bounds of empire. But as Zoé Samudzi and I argued in our essay for ROAR Magazine, “The Anarchism Of Blackness,” some US citizens, particularly those of us who are Black, are actually considered extra-state entities.

Though not all Puerto Ricans are Black, from Flint to San Juan we have seen that when certain geographies are associated with Blackness or the non-white Other, their citizenship can always be called into question. As Zoé and I wrote:

Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic. African-Americans, as an ethno-social identity comprised of descendants from enslaved Africans, have innovated new cultures and social organizations much like anarchism would require us to do outside of state structures.

Now, as Puerto Ricans have worked excruciatingly hard with the assistance of other people throughout the US to pick up the slack of the Trump administration, we can see the emerging contours of an anarchistic response brought about by the climate crisis. In the shadow of Hurricane Katrina and Flint, we have had it proven to us one too many times that the white supremacist state does not care about us. The consistent need to crowdfund and organize to fill in the gaps of the lackluster response of federal agencies for the richest nation in the world must call into question the very purposes of the state itself.

Trump’s proposed military budget of $700 billion is more than enough to end poverty in the US, make college free, or provide everyone with universal health care — let alone quickly fix the problems in places like Flint, Puerto Rico, and so on. Instead, people are left to fend for themselves, begging the state to carry out the functions it is supposedly obliged to carry out while depending on celebrities and liberal oligarchs to give like the rest of us. This is clearly absurd, given the endless wealth of the state and the gap between the rich and the poor.

The expectation that lower- and middle-income people will provide aid during crises with greater passion than the super-rich and state agencies, when we do not have nearly as much money as either of them, is absolutely and utterly ridiculous. But it is this utter ridiculousness that is the quintessence of contemporary capitalism. Though capital is unequally distributed, the burden of fixing whatever the problems of the day may be is all ours, while the elite shy away from ever having to pay as large a price as the cost of being poor in a capitalist society.

One of the most despicable examples of these injustices played out in California, where raging wildfires killed dozens of people in 2017, while inmates were being paid $2.00 per hour to risk their lives fighting the fires. Their confinement makes their labor hyper-exploitable and again flattens the burden of problems linked to natural disasters, while the elite who caused the problems remain unfazed in their chase to destroy the planet for profit. In Texas, inmates raised about $44,000 to aid those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After Hurricane Harvey, inmates remembered previous fundraising efforts and requested officials to restart a program that allows them to donate their commissary for relief purposes. After just one month, 6,663 inmates had donated $53,863 for Hurricane Harvey relief from the usually very small commissary accounts that they maintain (often $5.00 or less depending on the person).

Picking Up Where the State Falls Through

None of this is new. The Black Panthers focused much of their work around meeting the needs of the Black community that the capitalist state and market had failed to fulfill. Projects like the Free Breakfast Program and ambulance services give credence to the extensive history of this type of mutual aid. It was the Panthers who exposed the extensive sickle cell anemia epidemic in the Black community by carrying out the work that the state should have done.

The concept of “revolutionary intercommunalism,” theorized by Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, helped develop a strategy for structured community service programs also known as “survival programs.” These programs were meant to address the lack of helpful institutions and services in Black communities serving the needs of the people. The current situation demands proper respect given to its purpose. Intercommunalism focuses on and prioritizes Black self-determination outside of the state’s failures to adequately look after the needs of the Black community. The survival of underserved people is understood to be a part of the necessary politics of transformative change. Aside from the glitz of revolution that fuels popular depiction in the media, politics and culture, our current pre-revolutionary situation requires the everyday survival of those of us who would do the revolting in the first place. Intercommunalism pays respects to revolution as a process, and not merely an overnight reaction.

Across communities Black and all colors, we see a persistent need to address whatever shortcomings white supremacy delves out to us. It is not necessarily new for communities in the US dealing with white supremacy to support each other and build resistance from within. Starting our own services and building up each other is an everyday revolutionary politics of survival. However, what can and often does happen is that maintaining our own institutions within the bounds of capitalism becomes the objective when ending capitalism should be a necessary outcome. More than simply reacting to capitalism in anarchistic ways, we should be proactively working to overcome it by making our very models of resistance anti-capitalist. Depending on the likes of sympathetic capitalists and liberal elites is counterproductive in this respect. Instead of building ways to consistently respond to disaster, we must be proactive in ending the crisis of capitalism rather than solely attempting to counter it one day at a time.

A proactive pre-revolutionary situation will raise the consciousness of people to realize that they are already carrying out the radical politics they are often told to despise. Ahistorical liberal reimaginings of the past make tragedy into a necessary stepping stone for an empire that is learning at the expense of the oppressed. Real resistance positions people to build movements that undo the violence that oppression inflicts. We are not in need of excuses; we are in need of a better world. If we want that better world, we have to align our politics with a radical imagination, with sustainable everyday resistance and innovative strategy.

The task of making the planet a better place is a great task, but it is the only choice we have — lest we allow capitalism to destroy the carrying capacity of the one we currently inhabit. We can no longer afford to let crisis keep us entangled in this current state of disarray. Instead, we should charge our suffering to a system that must pay with its unacceptable existence.

Over 150 people worldwide have been murdered this year while defending the environment. This piece is in loving memory of those who have died and will die doing so. Thank you for all that you did for us.

William C. Anderson

William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV and Pitchfork among others. Many of his writings can be found at TruthOut or at the Praxis Center for Kalamazoo College, where he is a contributing editor covering race, class and immigration. He is co-author of the forthcoming book As Black as Resistance (AK Press, 2018).

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by David Istvan

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Building a ‘human economy’

Co-ops have a key part to play if the world is to move to a “human economy” says Oxfam after it revealed that eight people are now as wealthy as the poorest half of the world’s population. The charity’s report on global inequality said eight men share $426bn (£350bn) between them.

Tax evasion and widening pay differentials are to blame. Oxfam called for a “human economy” which works “for the 99%”. This would include environmental sustainability, gender equality and more worker-owned businesses.

Enrich Sahan, head of the charity’s private sector team, said: “Co-operatives fit in with our work with social enterprise and Fairtrade”. “It’s part of our DNA, for instance when we helped set up Cafédirect, to be supporting enterprises around the world that are co-owned.”

He added: “We have been supporting enterprises in Nepal, Ethiopia and Rwanda, for example,” said Mr Sahan.

“It’s a big part of our approach to inequality… Profits aren’t going to line the pockets of billionaires, they go to the workers.”

How can co-operative women be bold for change?

This year’s theme for International Women’s Day was “Be Bold For Change” – but how did the co-op movement taking up the baton? We spoke to leading woman co-operators to learn how co-ops can be bold.

Ruth FitzJohn, president of the Midcounties Co-operative, said “Bang on about it: Let’s be bold and persistent in getting the repeated message out there. We do not have gender equality. This is not fair. This is not efficient. This is wrong. It is our job to do something about.”

Dr Chiyoge B Sifa of the International Co-operative Alliance

 

Dr. Chiyoge B. Sifa the regional director of the International Co-operative Alliance Africa, said “Be clear about what need to change in our lives and surroundings. Be clear about the change we want to see and what our share in it. Act confidently as agents and advocates of the change we what to see in the World. Be courageous in confronting challenges on the road to change. Change may be resisted and roadblocks put to hamper our quest for a better world. Determination is key to any successful ending. Winners are not quitters and quitters are not winners.”

Claire McCarthy, general secretary of the Co-operative Party, said “The history of the co-operative movement shows that women with a passion for change, can’t sit on the sidelines. Mary Barbour, Margaret Bondfield and Joyce Butler were just the kind of strong women, restless for change, that Donald Trump would disapprove of. If you don’t like the increasingly reactionary, intolerant, and frankly unco-operative nature of our political discourse in Britain, then get involved and be a part of changing it.”

Platform co-ops

“Inequality is one of the most important problems facing our society,” said Trebor Scholz, a scholar-activist who first coined the phrase ‘platform co-operative’ – a digital organisation owned and managed by an online member community. He added: “With the decline of the power of unions and the growth of unbridled capitalism and ecological degradation, we have seen extreme intensification and acceleration of inequality.”

Co-ops aren’t the sole solution, but he believes they are one of them, alongside peer-to-peer networking, new roles for unions and technologists and a commitment to commons open source. These are types of collaboration that see people working together to “respond to the failure seen over the last
40 years”.

Using the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

Alyson Slater, chief network engagement officer at Global Reporting Initiative, said “The SDGs provide us with a globally agreed set of goals and targets for creating a better world. They are generally being embraced by the business community, and governments have made it clear that we cannot reach most of these goals without business engagement.

“Co-ops are in a unique position when it comes to the SDGs – they have  designed their business models to try to have a positive impact on some of the toughest goals – things like inequality, zero hunger, and life on land. If co-ops can demonstrate their contributions to these goals they may very well inspire other businesses to scale up their action too.”

Filmmaker Ken Loach at the Co-op Ways Forward conference:

“Co-ops embody values of common ownership, equal access, equality, that’s what we have to stress.”

Amelia Cargo, volunteer chair of the Group’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender network, LGBT+ Respect:

“The Co-op Group has a really good reputation of being LGBT-friendly. We have been in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index since 2005 and are the only retailer to have given evidence for equal marriage at Parliament. I was drawn to the Co-op’s commitment to local communities and its reputation as one of the most LGBT-friendly employers.”

• More from 2017 at 2017 In Review

Photo by CasparGirl

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From sixty-two to six. That’s an astonishing increase in the concentration of wealth: especially in just one year. Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term “Matthew Effect” — “unto every one that hath shall be given” — almost fifty years ago in reference to the phenomenon of the rich getting richer. But never has this concept been so clearly illustrated as it is today. Six people who could carry on an intimate living room conversation are as rich as almost four billion people.

How could this happen? The usual right-wing suspects, professional defenders of what they call “our free enterprise system,” are doing their utmost to reassure us there’s nothing to see here. But the fact that progressively larger shares of wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands should suggest to even the most unobservant that “our free enterprise system” isn’t really very free at all.

As a character in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and R.A. Wilson, explained:

“Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage. In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom— in anarchy— such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you…and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this…? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables…? Privilege… When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses.”

Equal exchange — that is, exchange between equals — is a positive-sum transaction in which neither party benefits at the other’s expense. Privilege is just the opposite. For every guy who gets a dollar he didn’t work for, Wobbly leader Big Bill Haywood said, there’s another guy who worked for a dollar he didn’t get. The reason is that the exchange isn’t between equals. One party is able to benefit at the other’s expense because they are unequal in power; one of them has the power of the state at their back.

If you look at the richest people and largest corporations in the world, you will find that their wealth comes not primarily from producing things, but from controlling the conditions under which other people are allowed to produce. That’s right — they collect rents for the “productive service” of not obstructing productive activity by other people.

Most of the world’s food is not grown by people feeding themselves on their own land or cultivating their land to produce food for others. It is grown by people working land — most of it stolen — owned by other people who demand tribute for access to it. Most of the world’s manufacturing corporations no longer manufacture anything themselves. They outsource actual production to independent sweatshop employers, and simply use their ownership of “intellectual property” — patents and trademarks — to enforce a monopoly on sale of the finished product. And the biggest concentrations of wealth of all come from the state-granted privilege of lending the circulating medium into existence and advancing credit against future production: a function that, absent bank licensing and legal tender laws, could be performed by the producing classes themselves advancing credit against each other’s future output.

The Gateses and Buffetts of the world, in obtaining their wealth, are every bit as much a beneficiary of the state as any feudal landlord or Soviet commissar.

Photo by autovac

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Following the first ever United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants last week, many civil society organisations and concerned citizens are taking stock of our government’s collective response to this unprecedented global crisis. The UN Summit was two years in the making, and gave a rare opportunity for world leaders to step up their commitments to help refugees, as well as draw up a blueprint for a more effective international plan of action. Central to these negotiations was the need to share responsibility for dealing with the crisis more equitably among member states, which was one of the key principles reaffirmed in the outcome document. Yet there is little promise for the world’s 21 million refugees that wealthy nations will be genuinely sharing—and not further shirking—their responsibilities to fulfil these vulnerable people’s basic rights.

Before the summit convened, it was already clear that rich governments would not be placing the needs of refugees and migrants above their narrow national self-interest. Rights groups widely criticised the watered-down agreement adopted by the UN General Assembly, particularly a commitment to resettle 10 percent of the global refugee population annually (itself inadequate) that was later dropped from the negotiation text. Another omission was the hoped-for Global Compact on Responsibility Sharing for Refugees, which was intended to be one of the summit’s main outcomes. Instead, any chance of a global solution is deferred for another 2 years of negotiations. What remains is a long list of general and vague commitments, without any kind of binding mechanism or targets decided for responsibility sharing between nations. More concrete pledges were made at a separate Leaders’ Summit on Refugees, convened by President Obama with 50 other nations, who together promised to take in significantly more refugees this year and increase funding by $4.5bn. But even these promises lack a guarantee, and may be reneged upon by the United States in its next administration.

So where is the hope that the situation can improve while 34,000 people are forced to flee their homes each day due to conflict and persecution, many of them continuing to die in an attempt to reach safety? The shocking trends show no sign of abating, largely driven by violent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa that Western powers have had a substantial role in causing or exacerbating. Yet the responses we are seeing from governments are often far from the fundamental principles set down in international refugee law, as reaffirmed at the UN Summit. Europe is currently building more walls than during the height of the Cold War; billions of euros are being spent on deterrence measures and reactionary cooperation agreements that are having limited impact on the number of overall arrivals. Our own country, the UK, is admitting only a tiny proportion of Syrian refugees, while shamefully diverting part of the aid budget to control immigration from Africa. The new UK government’s position is that those fleeing war zones should remain in the first safe country they reach—effectively arguing that the refugee crisis is somebody else’s problem.

It is not enough to question where is the hope, for where is the morality, the kindness, the basic compassion? In this era of growing polarisation, fear and prejudice, there are many ordinary citizens who stand in solidarity with refugees as they are forced from their homelands, stepping in with volunteering and rescue efforts where governments have failed. STWR joined 30,000 others as part of the “refugees welcome” march in London on the weekend prior to the UN Summit, calling on the British government to settle more refugees and provide safe, legal routes to asylum. The numbers of people gathered were considerably less than last year when 100,000 marched, thought to be the biggest national show of support for refugees in living memory. But among a population of 64 million, such a one-off event was never going to be enough to compel the UK government to accept its fair share of refugees, and play its part in forging strong multilateral action.

The same situation pertains in other wealthy nations, where the majority of citizens turn a blind eye to the senseless suffering of those less fortunate than themselves. It has to be remembered that while 65 million people have been displaced by war or persecution, there are millions of others living in extreme poverty who do not have the economic means to seek refuge abroad, which may cost thousands of dollars to pay the fees of illegal human smugglers. What about the many millions of people who do not have enough food to eat on a daily basis, or the 22,000 children who die each day due to conditions of poverty? The global refugee crisis is the tip of the iceberg, compared to this wider tragedy of inequality and injustice that is seldom mentioned in news reports across the Western media. Yet even the problem of internally displaced persons—those who flee their homes but do not cross national borders, totalling around 45 million people—was ignored by the UN Summit. We are left to wonder at the fate of the billions of other people who live without adequate means for survival worldwide, so long as the lack of compassion in global policymaking is sustained by a generalised public indifference.

Much has been made of the basic unfairness in how responsibility is shared between nations for ameliorating the refugee crisis, whereby only 14% of refugees are being hosted in the wealthiest parts of the world. According to analysis from Oxfam, more than half of refugees have been hosted by just 6 countries and territories that account for less than 2 percent of the global economy. But is this a surprise when we consider the lack of sharing that defines the planet as a whole, and the longstanding inequalities in living standards that divide the richest countries from the majority poor overseas? As Oxfam comment in their report “I Ask the World to Empathise”, the men and woman seeking a safer future have faced intense hardship, and will invariably have relied on the kindness and solidarity of strangers along their journeys, who may have shared their scarce resources with them. In contrast, most of the governments of affluent nations are failing to share their resources in the same spirit of common humanity.

The real question is the kind of sharing that is needed to deal with the root causes of this unmitigated crisis, when the international response continues to be woefully inadequate. A coordinated multilateral plan of action based on the concept of responsibility sharing is the barest minimum that should be expected, in accordance with the capacity and wealth of each country. A massive upscaling of support is also required for the low- and middle-income countries who are hosting the most displaced people, so that response efforts can go beyond humanitarian aid to include help for livelihoods and education. All of these demands are entirely possible and realistic, if the right resources are directed at the problem.

However, addressing the root causes of an economic order that constantly produces the drivers of mass human displacement—entrenched poverty, endless wars and worsening climate change—will demand a level of global economic sharing that is unlike anything we have seen since the foundation of the United Nations, before we can realistically envisage a better world without borders, xenophobia or racism. The fact that our governments have even failed to agree a new refugee protection system based on genuine sharing in any form, only serves to underline the obvious reality: that the true burden of responsibility lies ever more heavily on the shoulders of ordinary people of goodwill.

Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources.

Photo credit: streets.life

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Few issues highlight the imperative for a more just distribution of the world’s wealth than the widening gap between those who are considered financially rich and poor. In recent years, public concerns over escalating levels of inequality have reached new heights, partly fuelled by the yearly publication of Oxfam’s shocking inequality statistics that demonstrate the degree to which the global economy is structurally unjust and failing the majority of citizens. Given that the richest 1% of the world’s population reportedly own as much wealth as the rest of us combined, there is a general consensus that inequality has reached obscene levels and must urgently be addressed.

But a recent analysis by Jason Hickel suggests that there is a lot more to the problem of inequality than Oxfam’s research reveals, and he suggests that the world is far more unequal than policymakers and economists generally acknowledge. For a start, a huge quantity of wealth is currently hidden away in tax havens and has therefore not been taken into account in Oxfam’s global wealth calculations. Recent estimates suggest that some $7.6tn worth of assets are held in off shore accounts – 25% more than five years ago and equivalent to 8% of the world’s total financial assets. If this money was included in inequality statistics, they would undoubtedly reveal even greater inequality in global wealth ownership.

Hickel also dispels the widely held belief that income inequality is not as problematic as Oxfam’s figures on wealth inequality suggest. According to experts like the economist Branco Milanovic, although income inequality is getting worse within countries, it is actually improving when measured on a global scale. The standard metric used to make such claims is the Gini index, which shows that global income inequality has decreased slightly from 0.72 in 1988 to 0.71 in 2008 (on a scale where 0 indicates complete equality and 1 indicates extreme inequality).

However, drawing on the work of Professor Robert Wade, Hickel points out that the Gini coefficient is a problematic gauge of income distribution as it is a relative measure that doesn’t take into account the absolute difference between people’s incomes. It only highlights differences in the rate of inequality. For example, the Gini measure of inequality would remain constant between two countries (or individuals) if they both doubled their income over a period of time (e.g. country X doubles it’s income from 10 to 20 and country Y from 40 to 80) even though the absolute gap in their income grows considerably (from 30 to 60).

As Wade suggests, using the ‘Absolute Gini’ index instead would be a far better indicator of how inclusively economic growth is distributed, as it would show greater inequality when one country (or person) experienced bigger absolute additions to their incomes than another. Using the Absolute Gini coefficient, Hickel calculates that global inequality (in terms of the global distribution of income) has actually “exploded” in recent decades, rising from 0.57 in 1988 to 0.72 in 2005.

Inequality between countries has also increased exorbitantly. In 1960 people living in the world’s richest country were 33 times richer than people in the poorest country; by 2000 they were 134 times richer. According to Hickel, the absolute gap between the average incomes of people in the richest and poorest countries has grown by 135% over the same period.

In addition, Hickel presents calculations for the growing gap between per capita income in the United States comparted to various regions in the Global South. According to his analysis, the income gap between the US and three major regions of the developing world (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia) has in each case grown by approximately 200% since 1960. The global inequality gap, he argues, has roughly tripled in size.

These latest revelations build on Hickel’s previous examination of how the statistics commonly used by UN agencies and the mainstream media substantially underestimate the reality of global poverty and hunger, as outlined in STWR’s report on the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite the pervasive rhetoric and received wisdom from governments and UN agencies that we are winning the fight against poverty and the world is therefore becoming less unequal, it’s increasingly apparent that very little is being done to promote social and economic justice on an international basis.

Like hunger and poverty, global inequality is clearly a far more serious and systemic problem than policymakers are willing to admit – and it’s one that requires robust mechanisms for sharing wealth and power more equitably between nations, not just within them. But as long as governments fail to enact the redistributive measures and structural reforms that are now so urgently needed, the responsibility to hold policymakers to account will continue to fall squarely on the shoulders of progressive analysists, engaged citizens and civil society organisations.

Photo credit: Shashwat Nagpal, Flickr creative commons

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