CHARLES KENNY, Foreign Policy
The inscription on Karl Marx’s tombstone in London’s Highgate Cemetery reads, “Workers of all lands, unite.” Of course, it hasn’t quite ended up that way. As much buzz as the global Occupy movement managed to produce in a few short months, the silence is deafening now.
And it’s not often that you hear of shop workers in Detroit making common cause with their Chinese brethren in Dalian to stick it to the boss man. Indeed, as global multinational companies have eaten away at labor’s bargaining power, the factory workers of the rich world have become some of the least keen on helping out their fellow wage laborers in poor countries.
But there’s a school of thought — and no, it’s not just from the few remaining Trotskyite professors at the New School — that envisions a type of global class politics making a comeback. If so, it might be time for global elites to start trembling. Sure, it doesn’t sound quite as threatening as the original call to arms, but a new spectre may soon be haunting the world’s 1 percent: middle-class activism.
Globalization may have been the watchword of the 1990s, but it’s still a work in progress. As interconnected global markets get ever more interconnected, average incomes are converging. The last 10 years have seen developing countries grow far more rapidly than high-income countries, closing the gap in average incomes.
Economist Arvind Subramanian estimates that China in 2030 will be about as rich as the whole European Union today and that Brazil won’t be far behind, clocking in at a GDP per capita of around $31,000. Indonesia, he reckons, will see a GDP per capita of $23,000 — about the same as tech powerhouse South Korea today.
Put simply, this means that within the space of hardly a generation, a good chunk of the world will soon be rich, or at least solidly middle class. And many are getting angry … could Karl have been right all along, albet a few centuries out in his calculations?
Read the full essay at Foreign Policy …
