GABRIEL ZUCMAN is a French-born economist who teaches at California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics. Zucman’s academic specialisation is in wealth inequality, using tax data to track the stratification in wealth in the US and the rest of the world. A student of famed inequality expert Thomas Piketty, he is an important figure in the World Inequality Database.

His most recent findings expose a gross obscenity, a level of wealth inequality in the US that should shame every politician, every mainstream-media commentator, and every cultural influencer who fails to make recognition of this travesty central to his or her message.

Discussed in some detail in an article by Juliet Chung, appearing in the April 24 Wall Street Journal, Zucman’s most recent findings draw little attention from the other corporate media.

Zucman claims that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by $1 trillion in 2024, more than the GDP of Switzerland. That top 0.00001 per cent of households accounted in 2024 for 1.81 per cent of all the wealth accumulated in the US — nearly 2 per cent of all US wealth is held by those 19 households.

Other conclusions drawn from the Wall Street Journal article:

Total US wealth in 2024 was $148tn.

● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001 per cent of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.

● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.

● The top 0.1 per cent of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4m a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St Louis).

● The next 0.9 per cent of households — approximately 1.2m households — were each worth $11.2m and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).

● The cumulative 1 per cent of households account for 34.8 per cent of total US wealth in 2023.

● In capitalist counterpart countries, the 1 per cent account for 21.3 per cent of the total wealth in Britain, 27.2 per cent in France, and 27.6 per cent in Germany (2023).

● The top 10 per cent of US households hold 67 per cent of all the wealth in the US.

● The top half of US households have secured 97 per cent of all US wealth.

● Consequently, the other half of us households (~ 66m households, ~166m citizens) shared only 3 per cent of all the wealth accumulated in the US.

This data underscores the fact that the US is a radically unequal society, with wealth concentration increasing dramatically as one ascends the class ladder.

What conclusions can we draw from the Zucman/Wall Street Journal report?

First, it is important to distinguish wealth inequality from income inequality.

Income inequality is a snapshot of the remuneration that an individual or household might receive in a given period. For example, a sports figure or a celebrity might receive a huge compensation package for two or three years of success, but otherwise fall dramatically in income and end with modest wealth.

Wealth, on the other hand, is inheritable and cumulative. In a capitalist society, it is possible to have income without accumulating wealth, but it is almost impossible to have wealth without effortlessly gaining income.

Among the employed, income is always contingent. Wealth, to the contrary, is owned and can only be alienated by legal action.

While income is empowering, accumulated wealth imbues its owner with both security and degrees of power and influence proportionate to its quantity.

Thus, wealth is a better measure of personal or household economic status than income.

For those academics and media pundits who prattle on about “our democracy,” it must be pointed out that over half of the US population is effectively economically disenfranchised from the political system. With so little accumulated wealth (3 per cent of the total wealth), they cannot participate meaningfully in an electoral system driven by money. They lack the means to contend for office, as well as to affect the choice of candidates or the outcomes.

Even if the bottom half of households were to pool their resources, they could not match the financial assets readily available to the top 1 per cent in order to dominate political power.

Cold war intellectuals constantly heralded the formal democracy — the right to participate in electoral politics — enjoyed by citizens in the advanced capitalist countries. They assiduously avoided mentioning citizens’ actual means to participate in any meaningful way, influenced by the vast and telling inequalities in those means. Clearly, the bottom half of all US households have little means of engagement with politics, apart from casting an occasional vote for limited options, for which they have little say in determining.

Further, the next 40 per cent of households have between them, in diminishing amounts as they approach the bottom half, just 30 per cent of US wealth to express their political prerogatives. No doubt that provides the false sense of political empowerment that the two bourgeois parties prey upon.

The victory of form-over-substance in the legitimation of US social and political institutions is surely threatened by the reality of wealth inequality — a reality that empowers the wealthy over the rest.

The fact that the top 10 per cent of US households have a grip on 67 per cent of the wealth makes a mockery of “our democracy.”

Talk of “oligarchs” or “the 1 per cent” — so popular with slippery politicians or internet naifs — actually masks the rot behind our grossly unequal society. Neither “evil” nor “greedy” people can explain the travesty recorded by the Zucman data.

Instead, it is a system that produces and reproduces wealth inequality. While wars, economic crises, or the militant action of workers and their allies may temporarily slow or set back the march of wealth inequality under capitalism, the system continues to regenerate wealth inequality. That system is called “capitalism.”

As Paul Sweezy explained most clearly  in his 1971 lecture, The Transition to Socialism:

“The essence of capitalism is the self-expansion of capital, which takes place through the production and capitalisation of surplus value. Production of surplus value in turn is the function of the proletariat, ie, the class of wage earners who own no means of production and can live only by the sale of their labour power. Since the proletariat produces for capital and not for the satisfaction of its own needs, it follows that capitalism, in Marx’s words, ‘establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital.’”

Economic historians like Piketty and Zucman, who carefully track the trajectory of capitalism, demonstrate empirically, again and again, that capitalist socio-economic relations give rise to economic inequality.

While the distribution of wealth in advanced capitalist countries is not captured perfectly by the Marxist class distinctions, class-as-ownership-of-capital goes far to explain how wealth is distributed.

With two-thirds of all wealth concentrated in the top 10 per cent of households and an estimated 89 per cent of all capital-as-stocks held by that same 10 per cent, it seems reasonable to conclude that the capitalist class resides within the top 10 per cent of wealthy households.

It should be just as clear that the bottom 50 per cent, with 3 per cent of the wealth, and nearly all of that in personal real estate and other personal property, survives on income from some form of compensation; its members work for a living.

Thus, as one might anticipate from reading the 1848 Communist Manifesto, capitalist society today — 177 years later — remains substantially divided between those who create the wealth by working for a living and those who own the means of wealth creation and, therefore, gain most of their wealth from that ownership. Capital — whether it coalesces as factories, banks, or other enterprises — concentrates wealth at the top.

Between the bottom 50 per cent and the top 10 per cent of households is a contested field of largely income earners — workers — as well as professional, self-employed, and small business owners. While most are, strictly speaking, working class, many have illusions about their class status (“middle class”) or harbour the illusion that their class status will improve.

Some have been characterised as “aristocrats of labour” because of their relatively elevated possession of income or wealth among workers. Others are even better characterised — to follow Marx — as petty-bourgeois: small, insignificant capitalists.

From the classical texts through Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to Soviet analyst SN Nadel, Marxism has yet to produce a robust and rigorous theory of the upper-middle strata, though their members often prove to be the pivotal factor in denying social change. Accordingly, it is the segment most intensely courted by the centrist political parties.

If we are to remove the stain of wealth inequality, it must be its sufferers — the working class — who assume that task. And that task will only be decisively accomplished with the replacement of capitalism with socialism.

Zoltan Zigedy is a US-based writer who blogs at zzs-blg.blogspot.com.