Detroit Industry Murals (detail), Diego Rivera, Detroit Institute of the Arts. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Earlier this month, scholars working at the London School of Economics argued, “It’s time to face up to power in the debate about wealth inequality.” The authors note that of the various ways we could frame the problem of inequality, the framing that has most resonance with people “focuses on the problem of Unfair Influence. That is, it places the emphasis on how those at the top get to write the rules to suit themselves. This includes buying political power and designing an unfair economic system where billionaires end up paying an average effective tax rate of 0.3% tax on their fortunes.”

Twenty-first century political and economic discourse has forgotten an important lesson, that inequality isn’t just about numbers in a vacuum, but also and more importantly the social and political consequences of extreme wealth inequality: permanent (or close) class immobility, political domination, economic exploitation, etc. Current economic data clearly show that wealth concentration today is extraordinarily high, with inequality at least as extreme, if not more, as it was in feudal times. Getting their personal wealth out of land titles alone has given the contemporary ruling class much more powerful ways for concentrating wealth and exerting influence and control.

The rise of worldwide financial markets and much more complex investment vehicles has meant that wealth is more mobile, secure, and able to rapidly grow itself, allowing the ruling class to multiply and deploy capital on a much broader scale, deepening inequality in a way that was impossible under the land-based, agricultural feudal system. Even if the shares of wealth controlled by the ruling class are similar (and indeed the levels seem to be eerily similar), the mechanisms, mobility, legal and regulatory reinforcements, and scale of contemporary wealth and power concentration arguably make today’s inequality more dynamic and broadly influential, more pronounced in its effects and ability to persist.

The state decisively shapes, structures, and privileges capital through legal frameworks, subsidies, regulatory barriers, and crisis management policies. The economic system we have today is structurally embedded within and dependent upon state interventions designed to create and insulate inequalities of power, access, and knowledge and information. The state has not played neutral referee, but proactively organizes and shepherds the conditions for organized capital’s dominance. The state has no desire to be a neutral arbiter, much less a representative of a sovereign people. It is a strategic agent for the reproduction, expansion, and defense of capitalist power and permanent class rule. Its fake neutrality is the disguise for a deep and still ongoing project of maintaining the kinds of systemic inequalities that are necessary for capital’s survival and growth.

A strong claim can be made that the patterns of inequality in feudal societies and today’s state-corporate capitalist systems are more alike than not, even admitting important differences in way of life, economic forms, historical contexts, etc. Through both systems, across centuries, a pattern reveals itself, a startling one showing that a very small group at the top of the pyramid, perhaps one to five percent, have controlled half of all wealth or even more. A concentration of this kind becomes a durable power capable of maintaining hierarchies that run the political, economic, and social worlds. For all of their differences, and they are acknowledged, both systems siphon away the vast majority........

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