The Left in Europe and the United States has recently undertaken a decisive shift leftwards by waging a war on wealth inequality. This move is based on a grave diagnostic error, Albena Azmanova argues in her new book Capitalism on Edge. Economic insecurity, not inequality, is afflicting the 99 per cent. This creates an opportunity for the Left to place the fight for economic stability at the centre of its social agenda, instead of resurrecting the growth-and-redistribution formula that has proven so toxic for the environment. What follows is excerpted from Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Given all the destitution that the recent economic crisis has created, calls for equality seem to be somewhat petty and falling short of the mark. The accumulation of obscene wealth is a curious phenomenon and the juxtaposition of vast wealth and poverty is offensive, but the real injustice is that of poverty, not inequality. As philosopher Harry Frankfurt remarks in Inequality (2015), our preoccupation with inequality is out of place. We should instead be concerned with poverty: the poor suffer because they don’t have enough, not because others have more and some far too much. We are therefore morally obligated not to achieve equality or reduce inequality, but to eliminate poverty.
