A political alternative to “the one per cent”?

Submitted by AWL on 7 October, 2014 - 6:22 Author: Matt Cooper

The idea of “the one per cent”, the richest one per cent who take a grossly unfair share of the income and wealth in advanced capitalist society, was first popularised by the 2001 Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Wall Street declared, “We are the 99 per cent”. Danny Dorling seeks to build on this anger to stoke a mood for redressing that imbalance.

Dorling is well aware that the one per cent is an arbitrary figure, but believes is a better way of talking about wealth inequality than statistical constructs such as the Gini co-efficient (which represents the income distribution of a particular nation).

To say Britain has a Gini coefficient of 0.45 will create little shock. To say that in 2013 the average household income of the one per cent is £368,940, and that is fifteen times the income of the median household in Britain of £24,596, creates a palpable sense of the inequality.

In turns out that the one per cent also offers a rough-and-ready dividing line of the rulers and ruled in British society.

The entry point into the one percent is an income of around £160,000 a year. It is beyond what a senior professional such as a doctor or a teacher would earn, unless they are among the small group profiting from the privatisation of public services.

This group includes the lower echelons of business owners, lawyers and senior managers of the corporate world. It is itself highly unequal. At the bottom end the “ordinary rich” might struggle to pay private school fees but at the top, wealth reaches stratospheric heights. The top five families in Britain own the same wealth as the poorest 20 per cent (that is, 12 million people). The richest of the rich is the group which has become increasingly detached from the rest of the society and has driven the rising inequality.

Equality within the remaining 99 per cent has actually increased.

The bulk of the book involves an excellent in-depth description of inequality and its consequences in the age of government programmes of austerity. Inequality began to rise significantly in 1978 (interestingly, under a Labour government, a year before Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power, a point that Dorling does not pursue). In the early 1980s the polarisation of wealth between the one per cent and the rest began to increase. These differences are now being ratcheted up with the coalition’s austerity drive. The spending cuts affect the poorest. The only groups in society who have benefited are the top 10 per cent.

The book is much weaker when it comes to politics. Dorling points out how Britain is more unequal than most other states in Europe, but has little explanation as to why this is so other than the rich seized control of the political process in the early 1980s. I would argue that Britain is so much more unequal than Germany, the Netherlands or Finland because the British working class faced more serious defeats in the class struggle, particularly in the 1980s.

The gap in understanding causes problems in the book.

First, European states with less gross inequality are held up as good examples, yet the working class across Europe has faced defeats and been weakened in recent years (although perhaps not on the scale that we have seen in the UK).

Second, by removing the notion of class the ”We are the 99 per cent” slogan has serious weaknesses. Dorling repeatedly suggests that it is middle class opinion that will drive change towards a more equal society.

Lastly, and most importantly, he suggests that what is needed is not a political movement but a move in sentiment towards greater equality. He suggests that has already arrived with the 2008 crisis. With the banking crisis many people became more critical of the free market status quo. We have a movement, only inchoate, unstable and lacking in the self-confidence to carve out a political space in society.

To see the problem, one need only look at the inability of the leadership of the Labour Party to maintain support even for the most timid of proposals, and the success of the Conservatives conference in rallying support behind a nasty right-wing package of benefits cuts and reduced tax.

Dorling demands that we be angry, and there is plenty in his book to encourage this. But anger is not enough. We need to rebuild a working-class movement that argues for a coherent alternative to the greed of the one per cent.

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