Billionaire Wealth Grows — But Billionaire Bosses Shouldn’t Even Exist

Forbes magazine has published their latest list of the richest people in the world. It’s not surprising that these wealthy parasites have massively increased their wealth again with the world’s 2,781 billionaires having $14.2 trillion in wealth.

A trillion is one thousand billion. If someone gave you €1,000 a day and you saved it without spending a cent, it would take you 2,740 years to save just 1 billion euros. It’s obvious that no one can actually generate that much wealth through their own labour.

One third of all billionaires inherited their wealth from rich parents. The others have ruthlessly exploited their workers. Elon Musk for example is at war with Swedish trade unions and Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, mistreats workers.

The top billionaires make your whole year’s wage every 10 seconds - or another way to look at that is they steal a whole workers’ yearly wage worth of wealth every 10 seconds. As the socialist Karl Marx once noted:

“Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish.”

It’s the labour of the working class that creates wealth. Billionaires just live like leeches on the backs of that labour and every year they use their massive wealth to get even richer. But billionaire bosses should not exist at all.

It would take about $30 billion a year to solve world hunger by 2030 yet Elon Musk alone has $195 billion, while Jeff Bezos has $194 billion. That wealth is stolen labour and should belong to those who created it - the working class - to decide what is done with it.

Irish billionaires like vulture fund owner John Grayken, worth €6.3 billion, or the corrupt Denis O’Brien, who’s worth almost €3 billion, should have most of that wealth taken off them so we can solve the housing crisis.

Grayken made his money from the housing crisis and ran the Lone Star vulture fund. His €6 billion alone could build over 30,000 new homes.

But to do that we’d need to challenge a state machine that’s built to defend the rich. The June local elections and coming general election offer a chance to weaken the establishment by voting out their political pets in Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Greens and Labour.

But Sinn Féin have no intention of challenging capitalism either. We need to build a strong working class socialist movement to the left of Sinn Féin to force them to deliver anything at all once they get into power and to push beyond them when they join the establishment machine.

As James Connolly once wrote: “The Irish people will only be free, when they own everything from the plough to the stars.”