Opinion Sur
Distributive appropriation is a founding part of the process of concentration of wealth and decisional power. It constitutes a huge and constant theft impossible to defend openly, that needs to mask by whom and how it is carried out.
The concentration of wealth is a process imposed by powerful minorities based on the appropriation of value generated by others. It is a criminal act if it violates current regulations, and illegitimate or quasi-felonious act when appropriators impose regulations that make the illegal legal.
The dramatic thing is that the concentration of wealth does not stop. The greed and selfishness that sustain the appropriating compulsion knows no bounds. They impose a dynamic that penetrates all territories and social strata with a harrowing process of oppression of peoples and environmental destruction.
Dismantling such process is a critical contemporary social and environmental challenge. Its approach is essentially political with media and judicial ramifications. It requires forming a power that perceives the world in a different way, where humanity and nature are cared for and respected. That is, a broad social coalition with the necessary strength to dismantle the engines that reproduce concentration and liberate democracies captured by those who, by manipulating public opinion, dismantle resistances.
The concentration of wealth and the consequent decisional power can be appreciated from different angles, each one helping to better understand what happens. In these lines, we focus on the distributive mechanisms of the concentrator process, what we call “distributive oppression”.
Dimensions of the distributive oppression
One dimension refers to the appropriation of value by oligopolistic corporations that abuse their market power. It allows them to compress workers’ wages and suppliers’ compensation, impose abusive prices on consumers, and commit crimes against the State. With this, they obtain enormous rates of return at the expense of the rest of society.
Another dimension is the submission suffered by retirees and pensioners through incomes that poorly cover their subsistence needs. This passive class is highly vulnerable to permanent measures to contain public spending, a cunning solution to fiscal problems.
A dimension of high voltage and magnitude is that of tax crimes (tax evasion and elusion) and the flight of the ill-gotten capitals to tax havens practiced by high-income sectors. The appropriation of resources that belong to society as a whole, offloads a greater tax burden on those who comply with the law. These crimes aggravate the regressivity that prevails in all tax structures, those who have less end up paying relatively more than those with higher incomes.
Financial licentiousness is another major dimension of distributive oppression. It occurs when regulations that limit financial speculation and free the movement of capitals are reduced or eliminated. This skews the use of national savings, diverts investments that served the real economy (generator of work and genuine income) to much more lucrative speculative activities because instead of laboriously generating value, they extract what is produced by others.
This distributive reality contaminates the way of addressing eventual fiscal deficits. As those who dominate do not accept to contribute their own resources nor to reduce budget items aimed at financing works and subsidies for them, what remains is to cut other items of public spending, particularly social investments. In this way, the cost of solving the fiscal deficit is borne by the middle and popular sectors and not by those who concentrate wealth and income. Indeed, this way of dealing with a deficit is not the only or the best possible way, as it is explained in the next section, it is the one that responds to a biased and ruthless design of obtaining and allocating public revenues.
There are other dimensions of distributive oppression, such as when the State finances basic and applied research that few profit from its results, or when monopoly groups impose high fees for the basic services they provide. However, instead of extending this list, we chose to present some options on how to face and overcome distributive oppression, a way of affirming that it is far from immutable.
Addressing the distributive oppression
In this section, we consider options aimed at dismantling some of the dimensions of distributive oppression. It has been pointed out that they are part of the same concentrating process and, therefore, although they have specificities that are worth knowing when proposing solutions, their viability is subordinated to being part of a political action that coordinates and underpins each transformative intervention.
Regarding oligopolistic corporations that abuse their market power, it is possible to impose solutions at the level of value chains led by them. Here is where is defined how the results are distributed among the different participants. Without an intervention exogenous to the internal correlation of forces, the leading companies would continue to be the biggest beneficiaries at the expense of the rest. However, the State can encourage collective bargaining for workers to negotiate fair wages and working conditions. Similarly, it can take measures to reduce labor informality with regulations that allow small businesses to register all their workers.
The State can also regulate and mediate within value chains to favor a fair distribution of results between suppliers and leading companies. These are negotiations between unequal actors that need to be balanced to enable all the participants to develop and capitalize.
In cases where leading companies also abuse consumers from middle and popular sectors, it is worth promoting the establishment of new value chains formed with family and associative ventures of the popular economy.
Indeed, it is possible to firmly confront tax crimes and financial licentiousness that represent substantial drains of ill-gotten resources flowing into jurisdictions that operate as lax tax havens and to identify the owners of the flight capital. It is not an unknown field for those who might want to correct these criminal currents, it is already known who commit the misdeeds and the instruments they use. It is necessary to close these drains with strict controls and sanctions provided for by national legislation.
Financial debauchery extracts value via usurious rates and appropriation of assets at a vile price, with tremendous consequences by impoverishing those who dispossess and producing frequent situations of economic instability with sudden inflows and outflows of capital. It is inadmissible to grant patents of corsairs to capitals that more than swallows act as birds of prey. Where they see profit opportunities, they rush to seize them at any cost, they leave profound wounds in social functioning. Speculation cannot be rewarded but rather be cornered with regulations and controls that force them to retreat or disappear; with political support this is perfectly possible.
Policies used to solve possible fiscal deficits make it possible to verify tax oppression in all its perversity and ferocity. It was pointed out that the solutions imposed by the economic power do not touch their privileges but place the burden of adjustment on very vulnerable sectors incapable of defending themselves. For the dominators, the only solution to equalize revenues and public spending is to sacrifice other actors. There are better alternatives. What is needed is to work with emphasis on the level and origin of public revenues, along with unmasking the formation of public spending without focusing on abating social investment.
A reflection on the distributive oppression caused by inflation. When the rise in prices gets out of control, many suffer and few obtain unfair profits. Financial capital profits when it forces interest rate hikes; energy and food oligopolies, as well as private health providers profit as they have at their mercy unprotected peoples against extractions of value via prices. Inflation is transformed into a merciless mechanism of resource theft, forming a runaway regressive redistribution of income. The basic solution involves taming inflation to a very modest 2 or 3% per year. Meanwhile and for as long as it is maintained, the solutions are to impose additional taxes on those who profit disproportionately from the rise in prices.
Permanent theft
Distributive appropriation is a founding part of the process of concentration of wealth and decisional power and exists not as a natural and immutable process. A huge lie that masks a manipulation carried out by powerful minorities to get away with what is produced by entire societies. It is a permanent robbery that, not being able to defend itself openly, to sustain itself it requires to hide from public understanding those who carry it out and how. In this way, deception is manufactured, complicities are co-opted, resistance is demobilized and repressed.
One of the most painful deceptions is to make believe that the great appropriators do not steal since they have no need to do so. In truth, they would have no need to steal, but they do so because they are immersed in a destructive dynamic based on a compulsion to accumulate without limits, “as long as you can.” A path of solutions opens up there so that they no longer attack humanity and the planet. Nations should coalesce to exercise the decisional sovereignty necessary to change the systemic course, the alienated way of functioning. It is about caring and taking care of ourselves, about respecting nature, the ancestral Mother Earth. It is not a task that criminals want to perform; we wish they would lower their greed and selfishness, but they do not. It is a challenge for people and organizations committed to the common good who are able to rise above their own mistakes and pettiness.
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