Peter Kropotkin, What are your opinions on wealth inequity? Should it be alleviated, 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 not “natural” - it is artificially created, it is manufactured, it is the intended outcome of capitalism, created via multiple methods of hierarchy like inheritance, private property, state power, and wage labor - 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 appropriate the labor of others.
My analysis will sound quite radical to a modern individualistic mind.
I believe wealth is socially produced and should 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 a enormous number of known and long-forgotten people who created and organized knowledge and passed it on to future generations.
I believe all the wealth in the world today should be inherited and shared by all. No person has ever created wealth alone, and no person deserves the right to hoard wealth.
Allowing people to be billionaires—is absurd and immoral. No society that contains billionaires is free, with justice for all, because you cannot accumulate a billion dollars without extreme exploitation. 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 equally. Instead, it is captured by tycoons and corporations via devices such as rent, debt, wage labor, property ownership, laws, and government policies.
Capitalism creates fake scarcity. Two obvious examples are: food is destroyed to keep prices high, and houses are empty while people sleep in the streets.
There is no shortage of wealth. There is only a shortage of justice.
How can wealth inequality be solved? First of all, I do not believe redistribution through the state is the answer. This puts me in disagreement with almost every other political economist. Let me say this again, because it is jarring to modern ears - I do not believe in reforms that simply tax the rich or redistribute money via government programs. This cannot be a successful strategy because the root problem is not unequal income—it is unequal power. You can’t fix an unjust system with the tools of that unjust system. As long as only a few people own the land, own the factories, control credit, housing and government … if the unfair system remains the same, inequality will simply reproduce itself, crawling back like infection in an untreated wound.
What I propose Instead to abolish poverty is to abolish all the greedy, capitalistic foundations of Inequality.
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 peoples’s survival necessities with free access to food, housing, clothing, utilities, education and transportation.
Wealth should be organized around utilization and need, not ownership and profit.
I want my readers to 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 not only shrink—it would become impossible.