A recent article by the Financial Times, written by economist Michael Strain, argued that New York Democrat mayoral candidate “Zohran Mamdani is wrong – of course billionaires should exist”.
Clearly Strain and the Financial Times are spooked by the victory of Mamdani, who himself reflects a deeper anger against the billionaire class.
This mood is also present in the UK, with a recent YouGov poll showing only eight percent of the UK population having a positive view of billionaires. Almost two thirds of British people are concerned that the “very rich” have too much influence on UK politics.
Michael Strain, however, disagrees with pointing blame at the billionaires. He says that actually we should want more billionaires, and that Mamdani is both “morally and empirically” incorrect. So what reasoning does he offer?
1. “Billionaires make the rest of us richer, not poorer”
Strain’s argument is familiar: billionaires, in amassing vast amounts of capital and personal fortune, make the rest of society richer. They invest in technology to make society more productive and wealthier. The existence of billionaires is a good barometer that society is progressing and wealthy.
As a daydream fantasy, Strain paints a lovely picture, but he seems to have his eyes shut to the real situation. According to his own logic, the fact that there are 3,028 billionaires today as compared to 1,125 in 2008 would mean that the system we’re under is thriving.
In reality, anyone outside of the ultra-wealthy feels the strain growing with each year. Real wages are stagnating, public services are being gutted in the name of imperialist bloodshed and debt servicing. 3.9 million children in the UK are now growing up in absolute poverty, more than doubling from 1.6 million in 2008.
Michael Strain, therefore, is clearly not arguing on the side of ordinary working class people. Rather he is defending his rich capitalist friends and their system.
2.“Technological advances”
Strain handily provides the example of Jeff Bezos as someone who has created “technological advances” worth $11 trillion dollars supposedly all by himself, and who has only pocketed an extremely unselfish 2.2 per cent of the profits.
But it is not Bezos who creates this wealth. It’s his workers who are exploited in Dickensian workhouse-like conditions.
Workers in a strike at the Amazon Coventry warehouse a few years ago claimed that a worker was threatened with disciplinary action upon returning to work from chemotherapy. Bezos’s modern day ‘dark satanic mills’ also have an Orwellian daily league table of employees who came closest to meeting the ever-increasing gruelling targets.
Combine this exploitation with the generous billions in state subsidies for Mr. Bezos. This included a £7.8m tax credit in 2022 in the UK, to a recent data centre in Indiana, USA which resulted in a 10 year tax break which could be worth up to $4.2bn.
We can see what’s actually going on – billionaires do not gain their position from large risks that they’ve taken, or from the fact that they’re ‘geniuses’ who deserve to be compensated for the benefits they bring to humanity.
Rather, they become billionaires from how much they can profitably exploit each worker – the worker’s mental and physical health be damned – and how much they can extort state subsidies by playing the system.
3.“Income wasn’t “distributed” to them — they earned it.”
Herein lies the fix to the problem: as Marx said, the capitalists above all produce their own grave diggers. They cannot exist without the worker, and every product they profit from is produced by a worker. If Mr. Bezos did not turn up to work one day, his businesses would continue to run like clockwork.
It logically follows, therefore, that workers can run society for themselves, rationally planning the economy democratically.
Moreover, rather than investing in production or innovation for social benefit, the capitalists have long acted like drug-addicts, seeking any sort of short-term speculative hit – from subprime mortgages to cryptocurrency. Last year for example, the top 500 US companies spent $942.5 billion in stock buybacks!
Rather than society’s wealth being spent on countless imperialist wars of zero social benefit, or on repeatedly bailing out the banks and subsidising big businesses, this money could be spent on socially useful things like green energy, education and healthcare.
This is precisely why the Revolutionary Communist Party has been waging a campaign for revolution against the billionaires, to train revolutionaries to overthrow billionaires and their rotten system once and for all!
