Global Wealth Inequality

Political decay, poor farming and agricultural methods, a shrinking population, weakening military forces and a gradual decline in economic activity are some of the reasons why the Roman Empire fell. These are often presented alongside statistical or anecdotal evidence illustrating the extent to which Roman civilization had degenerated before eventually succumbing to the relentless barbarian invasions. It is tempting to look back upon the failures of past eras with a modern smugness that ignores the signs of our own decline. How will the fact that the combined wealth of today's richest 300 humans exceeds that of the poorest 3 billion be remembered by future generations as they learn about our era? 

The accumulation of such a vast amount of wealth (equal to the combined wealth of China, India, Brazil and the US) in the hands of such a small group of individuals is unprecedented, and has only been made possible by the rise of globalised free-market capitalism, which allows capital to extricate itself from its historically more permanent commitment to the labour it supplies. Before the invention of money, the interests of capital and labour could only be separated as far as one could carry one's pig to the local market. The replacement of bartering with a widespread currency created a level of fluidity between capital and labour that allowed economies to flourish, but nevertheless ensured that capital's interest (excuse the pun!) was still somewhat bound up in that of labour.   But in a post-industrial age, capital's ability to tap into and out of markets with such remarkable volatility threatens to produce the kind of economic absurdities that future generations may well look back on with the same smugness that we have towards those foolish Romans.  

South Africa can be seen a microcosm of the world's problems in this regard.  The solution clearly isn't to obliterate capital by means of nationalisation, which merely replaces one ruling class of capitalists with another (something that the ANC foresaw would be the chief challenge of post-apartheid South Africa), but rather to find ways of successfully recapitalising the people.  So far our government, via strategies like BEE, has accomplished transferring capital to a new black ruling class (as well as a brain drain of white professionals), but has failed dismally to reunite capital with labour, with the fruits of such a failure being on display to the whole world throughout the duration of last year's strikes.

Ethics, Not Economics, Will Fix Our Broken Society

In a country of war-like levels of violent crime; the constant abuse, rape and murder of children; and staggeringly brazen levels of corruption; South Africa’s loudest political protests have largely been framed as responses to mere service delivery inefficiencies.

In the face of gross moral breakdown, our public conversation has confined itself to a critique of the mere workings of government.

In his State of the Nation parliamentary address last Thursday evening, President Jacob Zuma failed to transcend this technocratic fixation – the solutions proposed did not broker anything beyond the increased lubrication of government machinery.

Whilst service delivery is a legitimate crisis requiring indignant and urgent action, one could arguably assert that the glaring absence of a deeper kind of protest to our society’s grotesque habits is of an even more alarming nature than municipal ineptitude and callousness.

Rather than confronting the darkness of our country directly, we have instead neglected the issues in a blaze of government-speak and rhetoric. Instead of turning to the difficult yet simple light of human morality, we have relied on technical intervention alone to solve deeply spiritual problems.

Even in the language of the official opposition to the ruling party, the terms of debate have largely remained that of inefficiency and delivery. The problem with this approach is that it never answers the question that is truly at the heart of our politics: what has gone so horribly wrong in our land?