Richard D. Wolff

While there are some technical problems with this specific number, most of the other numbers about global inequality point clearly to the huge and growing inequality that, with a few, very temporary exceptions, has been capitalism's product now for centuries. In 2014 Thomas Piketty published a volume that explained why as well as reviewed the key statistics which he (and his colleague Emanuel Saez at UC-Berkeley) have been developing for decades. For me all this points to and supports one basic line of criticism of capitalism. I would present it this way. The French revolution that ushered capitalism into modern European history had three slogans: liberte, egalite and fraternite. That is, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was to bring the world those three basic values. One reason Marxbecame a critic of capitalism was because he saw that while capitalism had indeed replaced feudalism as the dominant economic sysatem in mid-nineteenth century Europe, it had NOT brought with it equality. Inequality, fostered and worsened by capitalism as a long-term structural tendency, is a profound critique of capitalism; It was and it is today, perhaps more than ever now. And Oxfam keeps producing the data and analysis to prove it.