In country after country, human society is suffering from the exploitation and crushing domination of global capitalism. So acute is disparity that mere top 1% of adults own 51% of the world’s wealth and bottom 50% own only 1%. Most incumbent regimes, ranging from religious fundamentalists to liberal secularists, subscribe to this oppressive economic doctrine, which is agonising human existence more than ever before.
According to Global Issues, “almost half the world’s population — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. Last year, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption. The poorest fifth of the population consumption was just 1.5%. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined. For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment. The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die daily due to poverty. Diarrhoea kills1.8 million annually, 1.4 million of them die annually from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. Over 2.2 million die yearly because they are not immunised. Every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities. Around 28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted.
Based on enrolment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world were not in school; 57 per cent of them were girls. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names. Less than one per cent of what the imperialist/capitalist states spend every year on weapons was enough to put every child into school. More than half population of the developing countries are suffering at any given time from health problems because of deprivation.
Rural areas account for three in every four people living on less than US$1 a day. However, urbanisation is not synonymous with human progress. Urban slum growth is outpacing urban growth by a wide margin. Almost one-half the world’s population now lives in cities and towns. Out of these, two out of three urban dwellers live in slum or semi-slum conditions with almost no services or basic amenities. In Pakistan, these statistics are even worse than the average figures of underdeveloped countries.
These social and economic indicators are made far worse by the wars and conflicts imposed on societies leading to the collapse of nation states with unprecedented turmoil and bloodied chaos. There are more refugees and displaced people today than perhaps ever in history. Similarly, the causalities from these conflicts particularly the children, women, the elderly and other vulnerable groups in societies are rising with a virulent rapidity.
There has been a rising divide between the rich and the poor countries ever since the advent of capitalist states morphing into imperialist colonisers, explained in Lenin’s epic work, “Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism.” But in the post colonial period, the imperialist plunder through the mechanism of the world division of labour, crushing domination of the world market, and the vicious circle of loans and debt servicing of the poor countries orchestrated by the imperialist financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank has exasperated misery. Disparity within the underdeveloped countries is frighteningly sickening. Some of the rulers and elite are richer than those of the advanced countries. Today there are more billionaires in China than in the USA. Indian billionaires outnumber those in Japan. The most worrying issue is that this gulf between the rich and poor is widening treacherously in both the rich and the not so rich countries. Within the confines of this system, this seems to be unstoppable.
One reason of this retrogressive decline in living conditions of the masses is the fall in the rates of profit in conjunction with increased production capacity made worse by declining purchasing power of the ordinary toiling people due to the deepening crisis of capitalism. A close examination of the leaps in science and technology astonishingly reveals that the current productive capacity of the basic essentials of ordinary souls is much more than what is being produced. The only reason that this production is being held back is because the capitalist classes and the corporate bosses do not allow the production of these goods. The only motive for production in manufacturing, services, agriculture, and other sectors of the economy is to walk away with a sustained increase in their rates of profit. In other words, this lust for profits and the greed for more of these filthily rich classes has now become a hindrance to the development and evolution of human society. That is the basic reason why capitalism has become economically redundant and historically obsolete.
This daunting inequality and misery does not only create social and economic hardships for the oppressed masses but it exacerbates instability and violence. These socioeconomic contradictions are the root cause of the turbulence across continents. The oppressed masses are suffering from conflagrations devastating the social being of human societies, with even elements of barbarism in some regions. This system in reality has become an existentialist threat to human civilisation. It has to be overthrown for survival. By breaking the fetters of private ownership and profits, the technology and modes of production can be liberated from the restraints of producing on their full capacity, which would in turn create an abundance of commodities that could, within a short span of time, fulfil the basic needs of the masses. This is not a utopian dream but facts derived from official statistics of the largest corporations. These exhibit a production capacity that can fulfil basic human needs. The only way forward to achieve this historic goal of putting an end to want and deprivation is to transform the socioeconomic and state systems into one in which the motive of all production and services would not be profit but the completion of human needs i.e. socialism.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail