Inequality has always been with us.
Ever since we lived in the jungles we had
brute force, brute power, determine the spoils.
Civilization was all about moving away from
that situation where brute strength and power
determined the quality of life of the members
of our species.
That was the theory.
To a very large extent we moved in that direction.
This is something we should be very proud
of.
But we're very, very far away from having
created social relations between us, a legal
framework, a way of organizing economic life
that takes power out of the equation of civilization.
Economic surplus is essential for humanity
to develop.
If we don't have an economic surplus we cannot
grow, not just physically but also spiritually;
we cannot create new literature, we cannot
create new film, we cannot create new theater.
We need to have a surplus in order to be able
to invest it in all those activities that
make human life richer.
But the question is who controls the surplus?
And, of course, in societies that are very
asymmetrical in terms of who owns the means
of production – whether we are talking about
slave-owning societies where there's a few
slave owners, or feudalism or capitalism,
where you've got 0.1 percent owning most of
the productive abilities or machinery and
factories of production in society – they
can, in order to preserve their property rights
over those means of production, they use debt,
they use political power and they use the
monopoly position that their property rights
afford them in order to skew the whole process
of creativity of production in a manner that,
for instance, in the case of the media world,
we have 50 channels of rubbish to watch from.
We have industries that are dedicated to producing
things that we neither need nor want, destroying
the planet in the process.
We have billions of people there working like
headless chickens driving themselves into
depression and going home and crying themselves
to sleep at night if they have a job.
Or consuming antidepressants and becoming
obese and seeing shrinks if they don't have
a job.
In the end we have a joyless economy.
Even those who are extremely powerful, in
theory, the haves of the world are increasingly
feeling insecure.
They have to live in gated communities because
they have fear all the have-nots out there
that envy their wealth.
And in the end, we have developed fantastic
means of escaping need and escaping want which
we are not putting to good use because in
the end we are developing new forms of depravity
and deprivation.
And universalized depression – psychological
depression – which is incongruent with our
fantastic advances at the technological level.
It's a very silly way of organizing life.
