According to Oxfam’s most recent report, the fortune of billionaires grew by a total of $2 trillion in 2024, a rate three times faster than in 2023, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day, while there was neither an increase nor a decrease in the global poor population [1]. This last part requires a more thorough analysis, considering that an increasingly larger portion of the middle class lives under progressively worse conditions.
Oxfam’s solution to this would be to tax the rich, hoping that these taxes would be used to improve the lives of those most in need. They fail to understand that the rich are entirely antagonistic to the poor and will act to ensure this never happens. If the problem were merely about taxing the rich, we should have seen such solutions implemented throughout history. However, what we consistently observe are popular revolts where, in some cases, people are even decapitated.
I repeat, there has not been a single example in history where rulers decided to transfer part of the wealth of their wealthiest citizens in an organized manner through the state. In a few rare cases, there have been instances of charity that came nowhere close to being effective or reducing the wealth of these individuals. Never has there been a clear direction for the wealth of the richest to be redistributed.
As organized classes, they have their own interests, and these interests are antagonistic to those of the proletariat, simply because, in the final analysis, this wealth originates from the latter through the generation of “surplus value” – a process brilliantly described by Marx long ago.
Imagining a scenario where the rich are taxed and remain passive is an incredible naivety. At most, what would happen is that they would organize and put an end to it quickly.
So, what is the solution? Expropriate the means of production and establish a communist society. We must take from them the source of all the power of billionaires: the private ownership of the means of production. This is the solution.
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