Andreas Whittam Smith: Western nations are now ripe for revolution

If there is going to be a revolutionary outburst, you do not get much warning. Writing of the European revolutions of 1848, for instance, one historian recently noted: “At the beginning of 1848 no one believed that revolution was imminent.” Now the reason I have gone back to accounts of 1848 is because this date has kept popping into my head as protests against contemporary capitalism have spread round the world.

Not Paris 1968. Nor 1917 to 1921 when, in the chaos following the First World War, workers’ rule was temporarily established in some German cities. Instead I have turned to 1848, when much of continental Europe took to the streets in what came to be called the Spring of Nations, or the Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution.

In quoting above the remarks of a historian on 1848, I omitted the second half of the sentence. What Professor Pouthas went on to say was this: “… yet the situation in many parts of Europe was such as precedes revolutions.” Should we say the same thing today about the industrialised world? That is an important question for all of us who would be appalled at the prospect of anything approaching revolution coming our way. Yet there seems to me to be one good reason why we should be fearful. For during the past 25 years, the gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor has been steadily widening. The disparity which began to develop in the US and UK in the late 1970s, has been spreading. An OECD study published in May showed that countries such as Denmark, Germany and Sweden, which have traditionally had low inequality, are no longer spared.

The result is that in the industrialised West the average income of the richest 10 per cent of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10 per cent. That is an enormous difference. And if the comparison is made between, say, the pay of the directors of large companies compared with that of their staff, the gap is astonishing. In many cases, directors earn 200 times more than their lower-paid workers. At some point, this excessive difference is going to cause trouble. Has that moment come?

If so, it would need specific events to trigger an explosion. Perhaps the never-ending recession, increasing unemployment, the extreme difficulty young people face in obtaining jobs, the squeeze on incomes as inflation rises, and higher rents that punish people who have not been able to buy a house are sufficient for this purpose. Yet the protesters camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral emphasise inequality above all. Their website points to: “the social and economic inequality in the UK…the unfair and unequal economic system that favours the rich and powerful”. The parallel Occupy Wall Street in New York puts it another way: “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 per cent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 per cent.”

source: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andreas-whittam-smith/andreas-whittam-smith-western-nations-are-now-ripe-for-revolution-2372930.html