In January, Oxfam -- an international non-government organisation working for people’s welfare -- released its latest report about increasing inequality the world over. In a nutshell, it says that the richest 62 people in the world have now accumulated wealth that is equivalent to the wealth of 3.5 billion people in around 195 countries on the globe. And the richest one per cent people possess the wealth at par with the remaining 99 per cent population on the planet.

Reportedly, these were the latest statistics from October 2015. Based on this evidence, the World Economic Forum, at a meeting in Davos, was expected to announce some measure to tackle this problem of extreme inequality. But being a talk shop of the rich and the famous, it ended with the usual photo ops and grins.

One reason for this increasing difference between the rich and the poor is attributed to rampant tax evasion by the rich, but hardly any questions are raised about the basic structure of capitalist economies. Interesting, the media that used to cry hoarse at every bureaucratic privilege enjoyed by party apparatchiks in socialist countries and connected every social evil in society to the socialist system is now mostly silent about the inherent injustices within the current capitalist mode of production and distribution.

The media is more interested in fashion shows and academy awards than in poverty, disease, and prevalent ignorance about the real issues of people. Poverty, the lack of education and health services, and exploitation of the poor are never pinned on the capitalist system itself while every effort is made to project a couple of philanthropists as real heroes who announce their generous donations for the welfare of the people. Their good intentions and magnanimity must be appreciated but the fundamental question about how they were able to accumulate billions of dollars in the first place is never considered worth investigating by the media or even by the NGOs that want to reduce poverty and inequality but not at the cost of challenging the capitalist system.

The money accumulated by the rich is seldom their ‘hard-earned money’; in most cases it is the result of their cunning and shrewd ability to manipulate and take advantage of a situation that ordinary mortals fail to exploit. The billions of dollars extracted from the poor or from the public exchequer end up in the accounts of the rich, from where a fraction is doled out as charity and aid that overall makes little difference to the plight of the poor. The exploitative nature of the system remains the same since there is hardly any NGO that challenges the capitalist infrastructure of a political economy corrupt to the core.

A similar report in 2014 had predicted that in the near future the richest one per cent of the world would be commanding more wealth than the remaining 99 per cent. According to this new research, anyone who has the Pakistani equivalent of seven million rupees can be counted among the richest ten per cent of the world; and anyone with seventy million rupees worth of assets can comfortably claim to be among the richest one per cent. Though questions have been raised about this rough calculation, even if someone is near this amount is among the richest by all estimates.

So now you can look around yourself in Pakistan and see how many people have that much wealth but still try to snatch whatever little money others have in their pockets. The fact that the richest 62 people in the world have assets at par with the cumulative assets of 3.5 billion people is startling in itself but even more surprising is the rapid change in their fortune because just in 2010 the richest 388 people had the wealth equivalent to the 50 per cent population of the world at that time. It clearly shows that the concentration of wealth has greatly intensified during the past five years.

Usually such reports do not make any mention of the current political events but a question or two may be raised about the ever-increasing civil wars around the world during the past five years and their possible connection with this mounting concentration of wealth. One may enquire how the richest 62 people in the world are benefitting from the political developments that are apparently unconnected; which multinational companies and banks are being run by the richest 62? How the richest are prospering at a rapid speed and the poor are losing ground with equal pace? Who owns the arms and ammunition manufacturing companies that sell billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the same countries where meagre amounts are given for children’s education and health? Is any rich country accountable to anyone for this sheer hypocrisy? Can all these injustices be rectified by the pittance called aid money?

The crux of the matter is that most economies are manipulated to benefit the richest. It is much more difficult to reach an agreement to ensure a sustainable future but much easier to set up a bank to give loans on interest. A similar farce is called micro-financing that is used to charge much higher interest rates from the poor on small amounts of loans. It is no secret that the interest rate imposed on the poor is much more than is the practice in mainstream banking. The poor who get small loans are hardly able to change their plight with such small amounts and then are forced to return the money with the markup -- failing which they have only suicide as the way out. The increasing number of indebted peasants committing suicide in Bangladesh and India is a testimony to the fact that microfinance does not make much of a difference.

Similarly, income support too is highly questionable as it makes the government feel better by awarding a thousand or so rupees per month to the wretched of the earth rather than eliminating the root causes of poverty. The poor can spend that money to purchase essential food items but can never come out of extreme poverty. A major cause of extreme poverty is that women are almost totally deprived of their rights. Women, in most cases, work for more hours than men do but they are not considered a part of the economic system, neither are they given financial compensation commensurate with their work; resulting in much more extreme poverty among women.

Another major factor contributing to extreme poverty is exorbitant cost of health services that does not allow the poor to get out of the poverty trap. Most pharmaceutical companies earn billions by offering incentives to doctors who prescribe expensive drugs even if relatively cheaper options are available. In the absence of any preventive measures to forestall illnesses such as hepatitis, the poor patients are compelled to spend their last pennies on drugs. The governments are less interested in providing a healthy and hygienic atmosphere and are more concerned with big infrastructure projects. If you have any doubts please have a look around and see how many garbage dumps you can locate especially in smaller cities and towns; how many stray animals you can count while walking towards the nearest drug store. Overflowing gutters with nearby clinics and schools are not an uncommon sight in countries such as Pakistan.

The Oxfam report mentions numerous nets that trap the poor but at the same time facilitate the rich in getting away with tax evasion. According to some estimates, the richest of the world have stashed away over 7.5 trillion dollars’ worth of assets in places where they don’t have to pay taxes. When the poor of the world have depleting resources, the richest 62 have increased their wealth by 44 per cent during the past five years alone; in other words they have added over 500 billion dollars to their accumulated wealth and the poor have seen 41 per cent depletion in their savings. From the turn of the century to date in just 15 years or so the poorest half of the world population have been able to get just one per cent of the wealth added to world economy whereas the richest obtained most of this added value.

Similarly, the poorest 10 per cent of the world population, during the past 25 years have added just three dollars in their per capita annual income. The argument that a lot of people have come out of poverty is not very convincing since a greater number is added every year to the number of the poorest. The supporters of the this unjust mode of production and distribution often cite examples of the poor who are no more extremely poor; trying to prove that they forget that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are the victims of foreign interventions more than they are a target of their own people.

In this entire game of inequality, the use of ‘capital’ as an instrument of generating more wealth is devastating; the poor with their hard labour earn much less that the rich earn just by manipulating the use of capital. This is something Karl Marx pointed out more than 150 years ago and probably we need to revisit some of his ideas if we are serious in tackling inequality.