Above photo: Billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year. Oxfam.
Oxfam’s latest global inequality report shows how growing global inequality is a direct threat to our democratic rights.
Oxfam’s latest global inequality report, released during the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 19, reveals how billionaires use their extreme wealth to keep profiteering and maintain an infrastructure of sympathetic politicians, media and bureaucracies in place.
Resisting the Rule of the Rich. Protecting freedom from billionaire power found that, globally, billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year — reaching a record $18.3 trillion.
One of the report’s more alarming statistics is that, last year, “billionaire wealth increased three times faster than the average annual rate over the previous five years”.
Since 2020, Oxfam said, billionaire wealth has grown by a whopping 81%. “Billionaires fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024.”
The report points out that Trump’s championing of deregulation and his undermining of agreements to raise corporate taxes have benefited the rich and powerful.
Trump’s presidency brings into sharp relief what billionaire rule means for the capitalist system; it exposes its democratic façade, as well as its potential to further deepen inequality.
How the super-rich use their extreme wealth to stay rich is important to understand, the report said, if civil society is going to be able to break the pattern. While the gap between rich and poor is growing, with the super-rich becoming more concentrated, it says the mechanisms the billionaires deploy are a direct challenge to democracy.
The report argues that billionaires’ massive wealth allows them to subvert democratic institutions, including by spending big on legal costs to thwart any legal challenge to their methods.
It points out how billionaires use different mechanisms to directly undermine democracy. This includse buying politicians and political parties, which pledge to serve their interests and implement pro-capitalist policies. Billionaires also own, and therefore control, the mainstream media and artificial intelligence, which they use to promote far-right politics, including scapegoating refugees, migrants and other oppressed groups for capitalism’s failures.
The report said that, worldwide, billionaires are at least 4000 times more likely to hold political office than non-billionaires.
Furthermore, it said that growing economic inequality plays a major role in laying the ground for increased authoritarianism. This is evident in how governments are actively seeking to repress the mass Palestine solidarity movements and Trump’s neo-fascist Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is on a killing and terror spree.
In Australia, new federal and state anti-protest laws, which undermine hard-won civil rights and democratic space to campaign, will also widen economic inequality.
The lesson, which Oxfam seeks to draw out, is that growing global inequality is a direct threat to our democratic rights; democracy is fragile when the world’s 12 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity — more than four billion people.
Economic inequality becomes political inequality, Oxfam said, adding that any resistance to extraordinary economic hardship is met with greater repression.
However, it said this system is not inevitable and people have to resist it. We agree. People-powered movements for change are erupting in the face of far-right repression.
Heroic examples include the Italian dockworkers, who led global actions against the genocide in Gaza. Despite severe state repression, masses of people in Iran continue to resist autocracy and repression. And the mass protests and strikes against ICE in Minnesota are a sign that people in the US are getting organised.
