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Them and us abundance for the rich and grinding misery for the rest

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that the so-called "end of an era of abundance" proclaimed by Macron and echoed by other ruling-class figures is a fraud. Abundance never existed for the working class — it was always monopolised by a tiny elite. The current cost-of-living crisis is not a natural disaster or an unavoidable consequence of war, but a class phenomenon: the ruling class is using inflation, war, and the legacy of COVID-19 to intensify exploitation and enrich itself further, while preparing the ground for even deeper attacks on living standards. The central thesis is that the crisis is being deliberately managed to shift the burden onto workers, and that the only solution is the overthrow of capitalism itself.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is rooted in Marx's theory of capitalist accumulation and its inherent tendency toward polarisation — the concentration of wealth at one pole and the accumulation of misery, exploitation, and degradation at the other. This is drawn directly from Volume 1 of Capital, where Marx describes the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation." The article also implicitly draws on Lenin's theory of imperialism, particularly in its treatment of the Ukraine war as a NATO-led proxy conflict in which the working class is forced to pay the price for the geopolitical ambitions of the ruling class. There is a clear debt to Trotsky's understanding of combined and uneven development, visible in the comparison between Britain's wealthy elite and its poor, who are worse off than their counterparts in Slovenia — a country with a far smaller economy. The piece sits firmly within the Marxist tradition of class analysis, rejecting any notion of shared sacrifice or national unity, and instead insisting on the irreconcilable antagonism between capital and labour.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is written in September 2022, at a moment of acute crisis across the advanced capitalist economies. Inflation in the UK is around 10 percent, the highest in western Europe, and the poorest households face an inflation rate 1.5 percentage points higher than the richest — the widest gap in 16 years. The article cites specific data: the number of British billionaires has risen to a combined wealth of £653 billion; US corporate profits hit a record $2.6 trillion in Q2 2022; French dividends reached €44 billion, up 33 percent year-on-year. The political conjuncture is defined by the aftermath of COVID-19, the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, and the death of Queen Elizabeth II — the latter used by the ruling class to orchestrate a spectacle of national unity while food banks close and workers freeze. The article names Macron, Truss, and Biden as architects of policies that protect the rich while attacking the poor, and identifies the Adani Group's expansion in India as a case study in how privatisation and food price inflation enrich a tiny elite at the expense of billions.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is part of a broader IDOM series on inequality and the cost-of-living crisis. It leaves open several lines of argument that are developed elsewhere in the corpus. The relationship between inflation and class struggle — particularly the question of whether wage demands fuel inflation or whether the real driver is profit-push — is treated more systematically in other IDOM pieces on the "profits-poverty spiral." The geopolitical dimension of the Ukraine war and its role in disciplining the working class is explored in greater depth in articles on the NATO-Russia conflict and the energy crisis. The question of what a socialist alternative would look like in concrete terms — how to organise energy, food, and housing under workers' control — is addressed in the series on socialist transition and in Against the Stream episodes on planning versus the market. The article's closing line, "them and us," is a recurring motif that anchors a wider political orientation: the rejection of class collaboration and the insistence on independent working-class struggle.

Connections

The article connects directly to Marx's Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25 on the general law of capitalist accumulation. It also resonates with Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England, particularly in its use of empirical detail to expose the gap between official rhetoric and lived reality. The analysis of inflation as a mechanism of wealth transfer from labour to capital echoes the work of contemporary Marxist economists like Michael Roberts and Costas Lapavitsas. The article's treatment of the monarchy as a symbol of class privilege and a drain on public resources connects to the broader Marxist critique of the state and its ideological apparatuses. Readers should also consult IDOM's earlier pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic and the "we are all in it together" myth, as well as the series on the cost-of-living crisis published throughout 2022.

Key Quotes

  1. "Marx explained that capitalism causes an accumulation of immense riches at one pole, and of unbearable poverty at the other. The era of abundance never ended for the ruling class. But for the working-class, the perspective is one of increasing immiseration as the crisis of capitalism deepens."

  2. "While the ruling class complain that raising wages to compensate creates a 'wage-price spiral' that will exacerbate inflation, corporate profits in the US rose 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2022 to a record high of $2.6tn. What we see in reality is a 'profits-poverty' spiral."

  3. "The top earners in Britain are the fifth-richest in the world, comfortably part of the global elite. But the poorest rank at 15th, with a standard of living 20 percent worse than low-income households in Slovenia, a country with a GDP 50 times smaller than the UK's."

  4. "A planned cut to national insurance, billed as a bit of relief for the wider population, is expected to save a full-time worker on minimum wage £59 a year, while a person on £100,000 would save over £1,000. Truss described this discrepancy as 'fair' — because the rich pay more tax (which is false)."

  5. "There is plenty of wealth in society to resolve all the hardships that press down on the working class. But the bulk of it is in the clutches of private profiteers: who are increasingly arrogant, degenerate and out of touch."

  6. "The real purpose behind Macron's warning was to prepare the French masses for even harder times. [...] Macron told the French masses that Europe's support for Ukraine in the NATO-led proxy war with Russia was 'the price to pay for freedom.'"