Inequality

This is just the latest egregious example of billionaires playing by their own rules, using their extraordinary wealth and power to boss around communities with whom they have an exclusively extractive relationship. This particular instance—a billionaire literally dismantling public infrastructure to serve his most superficial whim—feels like a metaphor for our current stage of capitalism. The last few decades have seen an exorbitant rise in inequality. Billionaires continue to see their wealth grow, including during the pandemic in which the ten richest men doubled their fortunes. In the same period, real wages for the rest of the population have gone down. This is on top of more than a decade of cuts to services, underinvestment in public infrastructure, and the institutions of working-class culture fast disappearing.

The most powerful economic actors are no longer nation states or municipalities, but the companies that have been the vehicles for these billionaires’ wealth. Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, and Microsoft are not only expert at evading public accountability, but also at influencing politics so that the rules of the game are written in their favour. This very deliberate concentration of wealth and power for a tiny elite has occurred in parallel to devastating deindustrialisation and extreme inequalities of consumption. Fortunately, we may be seeing the embers of real resistance.

Industry

The historic port of Rotterdam has continued to experience growth over the past four decades, but that wealth has not been spread evenly across the city, which remains relatively poor. Growth for capital has been accompanied with low income, high unemployment, and limited public space and culture for the many.

In defence of the construction of Bezos’ superyacht, Rotterdam’s local politicians have deployed long-standing but increasingly unevidenced claims that the success of the port translates to success for the wider city. The mayor’s office, for example, has highlighted the jobs created by the superyacht’s construction. A local Labor Party councillor, Dennis Takis, is quoted defending the decision to temporarily dismantle Koningshaven Bridge on the basis that the city wouldn’t be paying for it and the jobs created in the process make it worthwhile.

These arguments indict a tired social democratic approach to industry which desperately justifies the creation of any jobs as a source of prosperity. In this politics, there is no room for industrial strategy or economic transformation. It is one of collecting the meagre crumbs falling from capital’s gluttonous dinner table. In this crucial decade in which we must rapidly decarbonise through green reindustrialisation: we cannot afford to orient our economies around the opulence of the elite. Instead, we should make demands for good, green, socially useful jobs which contribute to the energy transition. And we should demand that the wealth we generate is shared equally, not sucked upwards.

Resistance

In the midst of various socio-economic crises of climate, housing, and bills, working-class people are often moralised to about what they should and shouldn’t consume: buy organic, ditch plastic, stop flying, go vegan, cancel Netflix to buy a house, buy less stuff! At the same, billionaires travel in private jets and carbon-intensive superyachts. The highly-publicised polluting conspicuous consumption of the elite is a perverse joke to most of us. With our purchasing-power diminished and culture eroded, this is clearly not a state of affairs many people are willing to abide.

Bezos’ plan to dismantle the Koningshaven Bridge, for example, has provoked a backlash from residents who have petitioned against it: ‘Rotterdam was built from rubble by the people of Rotterdam, and we don’t just take that apart for the phallus symbol of a megalomaniac billionaire.’ Many have also pledged to throw eggs at the superyacht as it passes through. This may seem indicative of a relatively weak civil society. While Bezos gets his way, again, the people are left with only symbolic protest.

This is not the story across the board, though. Bezos may get his superyacht, but workers in his US warehouses are fighting back with their unionisation efforts. Amazon is doing all it can to stop it, because it knows that a unionised workforce would be an existential threat to the hyper-exploitation which functions as the basis of the company’s profits. The latest round of ballots comes after Amazon was found to have broken the law when opposing unionisation last year.

An organised workforce is only the beginning, but it is a necessary foundation for any effort to rebalance the economy so that wealth and power is taken back into the hands of workers. Whether it’s pay and conditions at work, a green industrial strategy, or respect for local culture and heritage, Amazon workers’ campaigns to unionise are an inspiration to us all as they strike fear into the hearts of the billionaires and capitalist class.