world

The fiercer the rivalry grows for making profits among capitalists, the wider the gap becomes between the rich and poor.

In the United States, for example, the absolute majority of working people are subjected to unemployment, starvation and poverty, whereas a tiny handful of the rich exclusively possess the substantial majority of social products and assets and wallow in luxury.

According to information available, the assets of American families increased by 1.9 percent on an annual average between 1986 and 2012, but those of 90 percent of Americans did not. Those who amassed fortune were the rich persons accounting for only 10 percent of the US population.

The incomes of company bosses or employers in the US were 20 times as much as those of their employees in the 1960s, 30 times in the 1980s and hundreds of times at present.

The Kyodo News Service of Japan reported a few years ago that the assets of American billionaires increased by over US$1 trillion even though the US was suffering from the spread of Covid-19 and the consequent economic stagnation.

Historically, working people carried on a vigorous struggle to raise their wages. At present, such fights are going on in the Western countries. Whenever the struggle of working people intensifies, capitalists make a “concession” or “compromise” to them, but it is a temporary step to appease their wrath and avoid a crisis. Capitalists set up tricky wage systems to keep down wages under different pretexts and cut jobs on the excuse of “bad” business.

A marked pay cut was witnessed in Japan from the latter half of the 1990s.

Wages kept falling in the country despite the longest perk-up between 2002 and 2008 since its defeat in the Second World War. Such business situations and the separation of income occurred also in the UK and the US. In order to boost their profit rate, capitalists slashed employees’ pay and took steps to fire them.

Today, with the improvement of human intellectual abilities, science and technology develops at a fast rate around the world. New sci-tech fields are opened up and modern technical means are developed, resulting in a boost in labour productivity. 

However, capitalists sack many workers to cause massive unemployment as they introduce new technologies, and increase labour intensity by using highly efficient equipment. They misuse the fruit of humans’ creativity as a “scientific whip” to exploit workers.

Employment opportunities decrease for ordinary working people who fail to get higher technical education, and even if they get a job, they cannot escape their lot as low-wage workers.

In capitalist society, the gap between rich and poor has reached an extreme unprecedented in history, arousing the people’s stronger antipathy towards a handful of the privileged classes.