New Economist blog comes tops

I was fortunate to bump into the New Economist blog when I was researching the nature of inequality in societies. Inequality is a serious problem for all capitalist countries, including here in South Africa. The success of our struggle to overcome colonialism depends on how we understand the nature of this beast we are up against. Hence my present research into inequality.

As it turns out, inequality is a feature of capitalist social relations. Among advanced capitalist countries, it is more extreme in the US and less so in Sweden or in other social democratic states.

” The wealth gap in the US is now at its widest since 1929: in 2005, 21.2 percent of US national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. In 1968 the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker; in 2005 the CEO of Wal-Mart earned nine hundred times the pay of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founders’ family that year was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the US population: 120 million people.” writes Tony Judt.

On 2 December 2007, the Sunday Times released its own SA Rich List: 200 capitalists and a number of high earning executives. This confirms our faith in the Freedom Charter as the best way to overcome poverty and reduce neo-apartheid inequalities.

South Africa is also an extremely unequal society, with the whites generally enjoying monopoly of wealth disposal. The blacks make up the working class and the poor peasantry that carries the burden of providing cheap labour for these rich and mainly white capitalists. They carry the burden of poverty and exploitation by these whites even after nearly 14 years since the end of apartheid. This is the price we pay for retreating from the Freedom Charter. Let us hope that a victory for the Freedom Charter in Polokwane will turn into a rout for the exploiters in this country.