followed the Civil War of 1861-5 – damage reinforced by a further wave of hunger and societal collapse in the 1930s. Thornburg says that heart disease, stroke and diabetes are ‘still rampant’ in the Old South. ‘Their malnutrition goes back to the Civil War and it has never gotten back on track.’43 For the black population, it goes back even further; those waves of damage came on the back of the greatest trauma of them all, enslavement.
Inequality is a kind of violence – and in no way a metaphorical one. It carries the same level of human cost as any other kind of injury; it also has specific, human causes – actual individuals have argued, worked for, condoned and gone along with the policies that caused the injuries, and bear responsibility as with any other harmful act or failure to act. Ignorance of the facts could soon be no more a defence for politicians and civil servants, than ignorance of the fire regulations is for a factory boss. The debate is no longer ‘just’ about rights, but about negligence and abuse of power.
Could tolerating inequality become as unfashionable as smoking? Could it some day be viewed with the same automatic revulsion as tolerating wife beating, food adulteration or toxic pollution – all of which are in fact more common in more unequal societies than in more equal ones?44 In the past, politicians knew none of this, but today’s politicians can’t plead ignorance. How long before ‘austerity’ enthusiasts feel a social chill around them, or even face class actions in court?
1 See Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, Penguin, 2009; Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality, Routledge, 2005.
2 C White et al,. Trends in life expectancy by social class 1972-2005. Health Statistics Quarterly, 36, 2007. Available at: nin.tl/lifeexpecttrends
3 Vicente Navarro, ‘Inequalities Are Unhealthy’; Monthly Review, vol 56, no 2, monthlyreview.org/0604navarro.htm
4 Andrew Gregory, ‘People born in parts of UK have lower life-expectancy than those in war-torn Lebanon’, Daily Mirror, 4 Nov 2015.
5 David Buck & David Maguire, Inequalities in life expectancy, King’s Fund, August 2015.
6 Wilkinson and Pickett, op cit, 2009.
7 ‘Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend’, The Economist, 29 Dec 2004; ‘Nomenocracy’, The Economist, 9 Feb 2013.
8 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Knopf, 1999.
9 Wilkinson 2005, op cit, pp 114-116.
10 This seems to be an overstatement, but only a fractional one. Nicholas Eberstadt calculates that around 23.8 million lives were lost in the Russian Republic in the 16 years that followed the breakup of the USSR: 13.7 million fewer births, and 10.1 million more deaths than in the preceding 16-year period. Nicholas Eberstadt, ‘Drunken Nation – Russia’s Depopulation Bomb’, World Affairs, 138, no 4, 2009, p 51. RW Davies has calculated that 38 to 39 million lives were lost during the Second World War: Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p 2.
11 Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902.
12 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, Oxford University Press, 1989.
13 Ibid, p 232.
14 The Romanian communist and writer Panaït Istrati was told this when he visited Petrograd in 1917, and was arrested after he replied: ‘OK. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s the omelet?’ Cited in Sébastien Lapaque, ‘Panaït Istrati, roi des vagabonds’, Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2015.
15 Stites, op cit, p 233.
16 Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, Doubleday Canada, 2013, p 90.
17 Ibid, p 135
18 Stafford Beer, Decision and Control, Wiley, 1966, p 478, citing UK government report ‘The long term demand for scientific manpower’, 1961.
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