Peter Kropotkin, What is your opinion on wealth inequity? Should it be ELIMINATED, and if so, how can that happen?
I wrote extensively about wealth inequality in The Conquest of Bread, in Fields, Factories, and Workshops, in Mutual Aid, and in many political essays. It is perhaps the most important problem my political philosophy seeks to extinguish.
The first thing to remember is extreme wealth inequality is artificially created, it is manufactured, it is the intentional outcome of capitalism, it is created via hierarchical methods like inheritance, private property, state power, and wage slavery that denies workers the vast majority of value they create.
Wealth inequality is a structural crime. Rich people are rich in a capitalist society because they steal the labor and value of others.
My opinion sounds radical to the modern individualistic mind but — I believe wealth is socially produced and must be socially shared. Food, housing, technology, transportation, science, culture— everything human-made in our society is the collective product of thousands of years of human labor and ingenuity made by an enormous number of people who created and organized knowledge and passed it on to future generations.
I believe all wealth in the world today should be shared by all people. No one person has ever created wealth alone, and no person deserves the right to hoard wealth.
I believe allowing people to be billionaires is absurd and immoral. No society with billionaires is free, because no one can accumulate a billion dollars without exploiting others. Billionaires only exist because others are deprived.
Modern societies produce enough wealth to make everyone comfortable, but many people remain poor because wealth isn’t shared. It is captured by tycoons and corporations via devices such as rent, debt, wage labor, property ownership, laws, and government policies.
There is no shortage of wealth. There is only a shortage of justice.
Capitalism creates fake scarcity. Two examples are: food is destroyed to keep prices high, and houses are empty while people sleep in the streets.
How can wealth inequality be solved? First of all, redistribution through the state is not the answer. Simply taxing the rich and redistributing that money will never be successful because the root problem of inequity was caused by capitalism. If only a few people own the land and the factories, and control credit, housing and government … injustice will continue. If the unfair system of capitalism remains in power, inequality will simply reproduce itself, crawling back like infection into an untreated wound.
What I propose Instead to abolish poverty is to abolish all the greedy foundations of capitalism. We need common ownership of land, and shared worker-control of industrial production. We need a totally different economy. The current system seeks profit from human survival necessities. We need to abandon that. We need a future economy that guarantees people with free food, housing, clothing, utilities, education and transportation.
Wealth should be organized around utilization and need, not ownership and profit.
Imagine a very different world where everyone contributes according to their abilities and everyone receives according to their needs. A world where wealth is not hoarded and concentrated but continuously circulated. In a society like that, wealth inequality would be impossible.