When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink declared that more wealth has been created since the 1980s than in the entirety of previous human history, he was not merely exaggerating. He was stating something that is flatly absurd. In the Western world, far less real wealth has been created than in any comparable earlier generation. The same is true in virtually every country and region touched by the influence of neoliberal capitalism.
Yet Fink is right about one thing: something truly momentous has happened. What has been produced in astonishing quantities are not goods, skills, or productive capacity, but papers, tokens, digits on screens — symbols, in other words, with essentially zero intrinsic utility. On its own, this would not matter much. It becomes catastrophic only because our political-economic system allows the owners of these symbols to appropriate real things from the people who actually create value.
Land. Houses. Works of art. Books. Furniture. Food. Energy. Whatever they choose. The holders of financial claims can steadily extract tangible reality from the productive economy.
What has occurred is a redistribution fully comparable to the postwar nationalizations — only in reverse. And if someone today were to demand restitutions from bankers back to working people, the moral logic would be no weaker than the restitution claims made after the fall of communism.
That is the real transformation Fink is dimly pointing toward.
There is another revealing detail. Notice how successfully we have been conditioned to believe that this massive transfer of property represents the “natural order of things,” while any attempt by governments to slow or restrain it is denounced as “redistribution.”
In truth, the redistribution happens every single day — whenever money flows from productive enterprises into the accounts of the financial sector.