Thursday 30 April 2015

Why doesn't the Sunday Times Rich List lead to a political revolution?

Every year the Sunday Times does us the favour of telling us how the super-rich have got super-richer: the top one thousand and their billions. Even when it's a crisis, says the Sunday Times, it's not a crisis for them.
Even when it's a crisis for you, says the Sunday Times, it's not a crisis for them.
I send this information to my friends. We tweet it. We Facebook it. We recycle it as damning info, evidence that this is how capitalism works, an argument for showing that all this talk of benefit dependency or the deficit or 'balancing the books'; are a smokescreen for a system that creates inequality. This is not the Big Issue saying this. Or Socialist Worker. Or Socialist Revolutionary Worker. Or Revolutionary Worker Socialist.
The Sunday Times must be so confident that we'll do nothing.
Maybe moan a bit. Write a really angry poem perhaps.
Is it because in the end we think this is how it has to be?
That it's the best way to divvy things up?
Or that it's the only way?
Or that trying anything else would be too risky and would end up with prison camps and starvation?
So in the meantime we should just carry on doing what we do, knowing that everything any politician says about fairness, justice and equality is complete hooey?
Or is it that people think we aren't strong enough or clever enough to change anything or run things ourselves?
Or are we each so in debt that we don't dare defy anyone in case we get thrown out of our homes?
Or that we so long for things in the shops that even when we can't afford them we want to hang on till next week, next month, next year, next decade…when we might just possibly be able to afford it?
Or is it that we're all in a race which any of us could win so we'd better not do anything that might stop the race, even though there will only be a tiny handful of winners, who will only be winners because the rest of us are in the race, doing the running, doing the work, that makes those tiny few the winners anyway?