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2020 bumper year for the millionaire club

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic, far from being a universal economic disaster, produced an unprecedented concentration of wealth at the very top of society while immiserating the working class. The central claim is that this divergence is not anomalous or accidental but is a structural feature of capitalism in crisis: the mechanisms deployed to stabilise the system — low interest rates, central bank asset purchases, speculative bubbles — actively transfer wealth upward. The bumper year for millionaires and billionaires is presented as the other side of mass unemployment, wage erosion, and precariousness. The article therefore rejects the framing of the pandemic as a shared hardship and insists that the ruling class used the crisis to deepen its grip on society's wealth.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws directly on Marx's law of the concentration and centralisation of capital, and on the distinction between the real economy (production of value through human labour) and the sphere of finance and speculation. The article implicitly deploys the concept of fictitious capital — wealth that grows not from expanded production but from the inflation of asset prices, driven by state-engineered liquidity. The reference to Marx's Capital — "accumulation of wealth at one pole is, at the same time, accumulation of misery at the opposite pole" — anchors the argument in the general law of capitalist accumulation. The piece sits within the Marxist tradition that insists on the class character of crises: crises are not levellers but mechanisms for restructuring class relations in favour of capital. It also reflects the Trotskyist insistence that reformist measures (taxing the rich) are inadequate because they leave the underlying relations of production intact.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is written in mid-2021, surveying the first full year of the pandemic. It cites Credit Suisse data showing 1.73 million new millionaires in the US alone, and a collective $1.2 trillion increase in the fortunes of 650 American billionaires. Jeff Bezos crossing $200 billion is used as a synecdoche for the broader pattern. The piece connects this to concrete policy: the Federal Reserve's bond purchases, low interest rates, and the resulting housing and asset bubbles. It notes that 40 million Americans filed for unemployment and that 40% of female workers globally were in the worst-affected sectors. The argument is situated in the context of a decade of austerity, wage stagnation, and precarity that preceded the pandemic, meaning the crisis hit an already weakened working class. The conjuncture is one in which the state acted as the crisis-manager for capital, socialising losses and inflating asset prices while leaving workers to bear the costs of lockdowns and unemployment.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is a relatively short, popular-facing piece that establishes a factual and moral case but does not develop the theoretical mechanisms in depth. The argument continues in several directions within the IDOM corpus:

  • The relationship between central bank policy and fictitious capital is explored more systematically in articles on the Federal Reserve, quantitative easing, and the 2008 crisis aftermath.
  • The question of how the working class can fight back — strike waves, rent strikes, the demand for expropriation — is taken up in pieces on the US labour upsurge (2021–2023) and the post-pandemic strike wave.
  • The critique of "taxing the rich" as a reformist palliative is developed in articles on wealth taxes, Piketty, and the limits of social democracy.
  • The broader question of crisis theory — why capitalism produces recurrent booms and busts, and why each crisis deepens inequality — is addressed in theoretical articles on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the Marxist theory of crises.

Connections

  • Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 25 ("The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation") — the direct theoretical source for the "accumulation of misery" quote.
  • David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital — on the role of finance and the state in managing crises through spatial and temporal fixes.
  • Michael Roberts, The Long Depression — for empirical work on the falling rate of profit and the structural crisis of capitalism since 2008.
  • IDOM articles on the 2008 crash and quantitative easing — to understand the continuity between the 2008 and 2020 crisis responses.
  • Against the Stream episodes on inequality and crisis — for discussion of how the pandemic accelerated pre-existing trends.

Key Quotes

  1. "The increase in household wealth of the already wealthy is not due to the growth of the productive forces in society. It is down to the ability of the rich to make money off speculation in the economy."

  2. "As the report states, 'the top wealth groups are relatively unaffected by reductions in the overall level of economic activity and, more importantly, they have also benefited from the impact of lower interest rates on share prices and house prices'."

  3. "The stock market and investment bubbles are largely divorced from the state of the real economy, which depends on human labour producing useful goods. As the ruling class pumps money into the economy all that is happening is wealth is being redistributed."

  4. "As Marx explained, 'accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole'."

  5. "The poor see their wages eroded by inflation, while those with assets see the prices of their assets rise further."

  6. "Capitalism must be overthrown along with its parasitic ruling class. This can be done by expropriating the means of production and placing it in the democratic control of the working class so that the wealth of society, created by workers, can be used as part of a democratic plan of production run for the good of humanity instead of for profit."