The gap between the incomes and wealth of super-rich capitalists and the masses of workers and peasants has reached an unprecedented level in our country. A recently published research paper has estimated that in 2022-23, the richest 1 percent of the Indian population earned 23 percent of the national income and owned 40 percent of the country’s total wealth. The gap between the rich and the poor is wider than in most other countries of the world.
The promise of “sab ka vikas” (development for all) stands exposed as a blatant lie. At one pole, the profits of monopoly capitalists are increasing at double digit rates every year. At the other pole, the wages of workers are lagging behind the rapidly rising food and fuel prices. Peasants are facing declining incomes and unbearable debt burden. Unemployment has reached an unprecedented level.
Politicians of the capitalist class are trying their best to divert attention from the glaring gap between super-rich capitalists on one side and the workers and peasants on the other side. They are deliberately focusing on the inequality between different castes and religious communities.
In its election manifesto, Congress Party has promised to conduct a caste census. However, neither the inequality of incomes nor the problem of unemployment can be addressed merely by adjusting the proportion of reserved quotas in government jobs and college admissions for the different castes and religious minorities.
BJP leaders are deliberately portraying the promises of Congress Party as a plan to redistribute wealth in favour of Muslims.
The truth which all bourgeois parties try to hide is that the concentration of wealth at one pole and multiplication of poverty and misery at the other pole is the general law of capitalist accumulation. Karl Marx, who discovered this general law more than 150 years ago, identified the source of the unequal distribution of incomes in the concentrated private ownership of the means of production.
As long as the means of large-scale production and exchange, that is, the mines, factories, advanced technology and financial resources, remain the private property of capitalists, economic growth will enrich only that class. The working class will remain poor, earning at most enough to feed themselves and turn up for work every day. Ownership of the means of production will get more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. The gap between the incomes and wealth of the bourgeoisie and of the working class will keep on widening.
In our country, capitalists accumulate their wealth not only by exploiting the workers they employ but also by robbing the peasants and other small-scale producers. They use their dominant share of the market to buy cheap and sell at high monopoly prices.
Various bourgeois economists promote the idea that the growing inequality of income and wealth can be addressed by government policies such as higher tax rates on the rich and cash transfers to the poor. However, these are only palliatives. They do not address the root cause of the problem.
The only way that the growing inequality of income and wealth can be ended is by converting the means of large-scale production and trade from being the private property of capitalists into the social property of the people. That will pave the way for changing the aim and orientation of production, from the maximisation of capitalist profits to the maximisation of the fulfilment of human needs.
Ever since the communist movement came into being, ideologues of the capitalist class have been trying to scare people with the propaganda that the communists will take away your hard-earned property.
The truth is that the growing wealth of capitalists has not been created by their own labour. The wealth of the Tatas, Ambanis, Birlas, Adanis and other monopoly houses are the product of the labour of lakhs of workers employed in their companies.
The aim of the communist program is to convert the private property of the capitalist class, which has been acquired by exploiting the working class and peasantry, into social property – that is, property of the whole people. This will put an end to the dominant role of capitalist greed over the economy.
The aim of the communist movement is not to deprive any peasant or other small-scale producer of his or her means of production. It is to encourage them to voluntarily pool their means of production and form cooperatives, in order to increase their scale of production and improve their productivity through modern techniques.
Spokespersons of the bourgeoisie spread the notion that communists want to redistribute incomes equally between those who work hard and those who are lazy, between skilled and unskilled workers, and thereby destroy the incentive for people to work hard or to acquire skills. This is a complete distortion of the truth. According to communist theory, the principle of income distribution that is followed under socialism, which is the first phase of communism, is “from each according to ability, to each according to work done”. It means that every worker will earn in proportion to the quantity and quality of the work he or she performs.
In capitalist society, those who own capital do not need to work; they accumulate wealth by exploiting the labour of others. Those who work do not enjoy the fruits of their labour; they remain poor and exploited.
The drive of capitalists to maximise private profits dominates all economic decisions in the present system. Capitalists invest in expanding productive capacity only when they are confident of reaping maximum profits. When they do not expect maximum profits they cut back on production. This is the reason why crores of people who are willing to work remain unemployed or underemployed. By replacing the capitalist profit motive with the motive of maximising the fulfilment of people’s needs, the communist program will solve the problem of unemployment. The need to produce more of all essential articles that people need will ensure jobs for all.
By putting an end to all forms of exploitation of labour, this program will ensure that those who work will begin to enjoy the fruits of their labour; they will grow more and more prosperous as the economy develops. This will lead to a tremendous increase in the incentive and enthusiasm of the working people, resulting in rapid growth in labour productivity and prosperity for all the working people.
In sum, the growing inequality of income and wealth is an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system, which has reached its highest and most parasitic stage. The only solution is to carry out the transformation from capitalism to socialism, the first phase of communism.