A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: A World of Plenty, Organised for Poverty (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Extreme inequality is no longer a trend that economists cautiously warn 
about or a distant moral concern for charity campaigns. It is now the 
defining feature of global capitalism. The latest World Inequality 
Report, discussed by Michael Roberts in "Extreme Inequality - and what 
to do about it", confirms what working people have long known from lived 
experience: wealth is being hoarded at the top at a scale unprecedented 
in human history, while the majority are expected to accept stagnation, 
precarity and ecological collapse as the normal price of "economic growth".

Today, the richest ten percent of the world's population take more 
income than the remaining ninety percent combined. A tiny elite of 
roughly sixty thousand people controls more wealth than half of 
humanity. These numbers are so grotesque that they almost lose meaning 
through repetition, yet they describe a reality that structures everyday 
life from housing unaffordability and crumbling health systems to 
climate breakdown and permanent insecurity for workers. Inequality is 
not an abstract statistic; it is the background condition shaping how we 
live, work and survive.

What is striking about the current moment is not just how extreme 
inequality has become, but how openly it is now defended. We are told 
that billionaires are "job creators", that obscene wealth is the reward 
for "innovation", and that any attempt to limit accumulation will harm 
everyone else. This ideological cover has become thinner over time, 
precisely because the material outcomes are impossible to hide. 
Productivity rises, profits soar, and yet wages flatline. Wealth 
multiplies at the top, while public services are stripped back and 
people are blamed for failing to thrive in an economy rigged against them.

The World Inequality Report makes clear that this concentration of 
wealth is not accidental. Since the 1980s, the deliberate dismantling of 
labour protections, the privatisation of public assets, and the 
globalisation of capital have allowed wealth to flow upwards with 
remarkable efficiency. Tax systems have been re-engineered to favour 
capital over labour. Financial markets have been deregulated, enabling 
speculative profits divorced from any social use. States have become 
managers of inequality rather than restraints on it, ensuring that the 
conditions for accumulation remain intact even during crises.

This global picture has local resonance in Aotearoa New Zealand. While 
politicians still trade on myths of fairness and opportunity, wealth 
inequality here has steadily deepened since the neoliberal restructuring 
of the 1980s and 1990s. Housing has become a primary vehicle for 
accumulation, locking entire generations out of secure shelter while 
landlords extract rent as a form of unearned income. Maori and Pasifika 
communities continue to experience disproportionately worse outcomes 
across health, housing and income, a direct legacy of colonial 
dispossession compounded by capitalist exploitation. None of this is a 
policy failure, rather it is the logical outcome of a system designed to 
concentrate ownership.

One of the most politically useful insights from the inequality data is 
the way it exposes the connection between wealth concentration and 
climate destruction. The richest layers of society are not only the 
primary beneficiaries of capitalist growth, they are also its most 
destructive agents. The top ten percent are responsible for the vast 
majority of emissions linked to private consumption and investment, 
while the poorest half of the world contributes almost nothing to the 
climate crisis. Yet it is the poor who face the harshest consequences, 
from rising food prices to displacement and environmental collapse.

This alone should demolish the moral blackmail that frames climate 
action as a sacrifice demanded of ordinary people. The problem is not 
that "we all consume too much", it is that capital demands endless 
expansion, and the wealthy profit from it. Any serious response to 
climate change must therefore confront inequality at its root. Green 
capitalism, carbon trading schemes, and market incentives merely 
repackage the same logic of accumulation under a different aesthetic. 
They do nothing to challenge who owns, controls and benefits from 
production.

Michael Roberts is clear that mainstream responses to inequality, while 
often well-intentioned, fail to address these structural realities. 
Proposals for wealth taxes, improved public services, and international 
cooperation on tax avoidance are important, but they remain defensive 
measures within a system that constantly regenerates inequality. Even 
where such reforms are implemented, they are fragile and reversible. 
Capital is mobile, organised and politically powerful; gains made 
through reform can be undone the moment they threaten profitability.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this limitation is fundamental. 
Redistribution after the fact does not change the underlying relations 
of power. As long as a small minority owns the means of production - 
land, housing, infrastructure, factories, finance - inequality will 
reassert itself. The state, no matter how progressive its rhetoric, 
exists to manage these relations, not abolish them. This is why decades 
of social democratic compromise have failed to halt the upward transfer 
of wealth.

The deeper question, then, is not how to make capitalism fairer, but why 
we continue to accept a system that requires inequality to function. 
Capital accumulation depends on exploitation. Profit is extracted from 
labour by paying workers less than the value they create. This surplus 
is then reinvested to generate more profit, concentrating wealth and 
power in fewer hands over time. No amount of moral appeal or 
technocratic adjustment can change this basic mechanism.

Anarcho-communism begins from a different premise: that the resources 
and productive capacity of society should be held in common and 
democratically controlled by those who use them. This is not an abstract 
utopia but a practical alternative rooted in cooperation, mutual aid and 
collective self-management. Rather than redistributing wealth after it 
has been hoarded, anarcho-communism aims to prevent hoarding altogether 
by abolishing private ownership of productive assets.

Under such a system, production would be organised around human need 
rather than profit. Housing would exist to shelter people, not to 
generate rent. Food would be grown to feed communities, not to maximise 
export returns. Energy systems would be designed for sustainability and 
collective benefit, not shareholder dividends. The obscene accumulation 
of wealth that defines our current reality would simply be impossible.

Critics often respond that this vision is unrealistic, yet what could be 
more unrealistic than a system that concentrates vast wealth in the 
hands of a few while pushing the planet toward ecological collapse? 
Capitalism presents itself as inevitable only because alternatives have 
been systematically marginalised or violently suppressed. History is 
full of examples of cooperative production, commons-based resource 
management and non-hierarchical organisation. These practices persist 
today, often invisibly, wherever people organise to meet their needs 
outside the market.

The challenge, of course, is scale and power. Capitalism is not merely 
an economic system but a social order enforced by law, police and 
military force. Dismantling it requires organised collective resistance. 
This is where the struggle against inequality becomes inseparable from 
class struggle. Workers withholding labour, tenants organising against 
landlords, communities defending land and water from extraction - these 
are not isolated issues but interconnected fronts in the same conflict.

In Aotearoa, this also means confronting the ongoing reality of colonial 
capitalism. The theft of Maori land was not a historical aberration but 
a foundational act of accumulation. Any genuine movement against 
inequality must therefore be anti-colonial, supporting tino 
rangatiratanga and recognising that capitalism and settler colonialism 
are deeply intertwined. Re-indigenisation is not an optional add-on to 
class struggle; it is central to dismantling the structures that produce 
inequality here.

What, then, is to be done? Not in the sense of policy recommendations, 
but in terms of building power. The answer is not to wait for better 
leaders or kinder governments, but to organise where we are. 
Strengthening unions, supporting strikes, building tenant and community 
organisations, creating networks of mutual aid. These are not symbolic 
gestures but concrete steps toward a different social order. They 
challenge capital directly by asserting collective control over labour 
and resources.

Internationally, solidarity matters more than ever. Capital moves freely 
across borders, exploiting differences in wages, regulation and 
political stability. Resistance must be equally internationalist, 
rejecting nationalist narratives that pit workers against each other. 
Global inequality is not caused by migrants or foreign workers, but by a 
system that extracts wealth from the Global South and concentrates it in 
imperial centres. An anarcho-communist politics insists on solidarity 
across borders, recognising shared interests against a common enemy.

The data on extreme inequality should not lead us to despair, but to 
clarity. The problem is not that we lack wealth or productive capacity; 
it is that wealth is controlled by a class whose interests are 
fundamentally opposed to human flourishing. Ending extreme inequality is 
not a matter of better distribution within capitalism, but of abolishing 
the system that creates it.

The choice before us is stark. Either we accept a future of deepening 
inequality, ecological collapse and permanent insecurity, or we organise 
to build something different. Capitalism will not collapse on its own, 
nor will it reform itself into justice. It must be confronted, resisted 
and replaced.

There is no technocratic fix for a system built on exploitation. There 
is only struggle, solidarity and the collective creation of a world 
where no one hoards while others go without. Extreme inequality is not 
an unfortunate outcome, it is capitalism working exactly as intended. 
Our task is to make it unworkable.

https://awsm.nz/a-world-of-plenty-organised-for-poverty/
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