As the world’s political and corporate elite gathered in Davos amid accelerating global chaos, Oxfam’s latest inequality reports expose how the capitalist world system really works and who it is designed to serve.
Periods of crisis and instability do not automatically produce justice or change; they produce openings, and the ruling class is scrambling frantically to exploit them using the chaos they have created, and to exploit the numbness, fear, confusion and overwhelm these overlapping crises generate, to push their agenda, resulting in record upward transfers of wealth and unprecedented growth in billionaire fortunes.
In 2025 alone, billionaires added $2.5 trillion to their fortunes, an amount roughly equal to the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population, and enough to end extreme poverty 26 times over. Shockingly, the 12 wealthiest individuals on Earth now own more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people combined. The Oxfam reports make clear that such inequality isn’t a ‘failure’ of the market economy, it is a feature of a system working exactly as designed, and it is actively engineered by the rich and powerful who have now captured almost every aspect of our societies, from governments to property, to agriculture, energy, media, military and education. According to Oxfam’s report, billionaires are 4,000 times more likely than an ordinary person to hold political office, reflecting James Connolly’s famous quote that “governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class”.
Is it any surprise that tax cuts for the rich corporate tax dodging, and anti-worker policies have become the norm? We see it everywhere: public policy bends to corporate lobbyists, multinational companies and billionaire donors, while the voices of workers and communities go unheard. Nowhere is the hijacking of democracy more blatant than in the realm of information. A handful of super-rich individuals own more than half the world’s major media companies and virtually all the top social media platforms. The recent forced sale of TikTok to Larry Ellison (who just so happens to be the largest private donor to the Israeli Army) and his investor group is emblematic of this shift. Globally, 9 of the 10 biggest social media companies are now owned by just 6 billionaires, and billionaire magnates run 8 of the 10 leading AI tech firms.
This stranglehold on information and technology allows an ultra-wealthy clique to shape public opinion, narrow the limits of debate, and stifle dissent to defend their increasingly violent interests at home and abroad. The violence of this system is not abstract, capitalism kills in many shapes and forms. In the 26 counties, more people died by suicide in the seven years of austerity after the financial crash of 2008 than were killed in thirty years of armed conflict in the Six Counties (1969–1998), and the concentration of media power shapes how we understand the notion of violence, and how top-down violence is justified, normalised, and sold to the public, whilst liberation movements are painted as violent terrorists. Nowhere is this clearer than today, as political, media and corporate power operate in lockstep to justify and normalise the genocide in Palestine, while we watch US corporations and aligned Zionist interests extend their reach into Venezuela, Iran and now seemingly even Greenland. Across this media ecosystem, the same lies are endlessly recycled: the poor are blamed for their own poverty, the victims of imperialism are branded as savages under the rule of despotic dictators, and workers everywhere are told there is no alternative to the neoliberal, neocolonial order. As Oxfam’s report warns, billions are left facing hunger and “avoidable hardships” because economic policy ensures that wealth is siphoned towards the top, both within nations and on a global scale. Capitalist “democracy” has become a sham an increasingly thin veil over the dictatorship of big business and colonial interests. This cannot be reformed with polite appeals or half-measures. It must be transformed.
Some might comfort themselves that the 26 county ‘Republic’ is different, but the truth is that it is a microcosm of the same imperialist system, and therefore, reproduces the same crises. According to Oxfam Ireland’s report, 11 Irish billionaires now hoard more wealth (€46.7 billion) than 85% of adults in the state, more wealth than what 3.4 million Irish people own combined! Their wealth continues to skyrocket; an Irish billionaire can earn the average worker’s annual wage in just 7 hours, as Ireland’s working class endure a cost-of-living nightmare, as record numbers are pushed into homelessness, precarity and hardship, in the shadow of obscene private wealth. In reality, the 26 counties have one of the most unequal market-income and wealth regimes in Europe. Nearly 17,000 people, including over 5,300 children, are now homeless, as the landlord class continue to leech off the productive members of society. In the 26 counties homeowners now own 97% of all wealth, while renters, around 30% of the population and rising, hold just 3%.
This imbalance means rent and house prices have spiralled beyond control, locking an entire generation out of secure housing. 300,000 people in the Irish state (almost 5% of the population) are struggling with food insecurity, at a time when on paper, the “Republic” of Ireland is, per capita, one of the wealthiest nations in the history of the world. Despite this, for the nurses, teachers, retail workers, and gig workers, the very ‘essential workers’ who keep society running, that ‘wealth’ exists only in spreadsheets, government speeches and RTE broadcasts, rather than their daily lives. Meanwhile, the wealthy few continue to accumulate property and political clout to ensure the status quo continues. The housing crisis, the hospital waiting lists, and the undemocratic, FDI-led ‘development’ strategy have resulted in massive inequality, surging division and vast emigration of our youth, which is now being substituted by low-wage workers being scapegoated for the greed of the comprador class. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and rest of the parasitic ruling-elite continue to pamper investors and speculators while ordinary people suffer. This system does not end at the border. In the Six Counties it is sustained through British subvention, neoliberal restructuring and the deliberate management of sectarian division, but the outcome is the same: entrenched poverty, mental health crises, ecological damage, privatisation and a hollowed-out public realm.
Over a century ago, James Connolly warned what would happen if Ireland won independence but left capitalism and landlordism in place. He famously said that “if you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain”. Connolly’s prophecy rings truer than ever in 2026. The British imperial army left the 26 counties, but imperialism still plagues us in the form of international finance, monopoly tech, corporate landlords, and a native capitalist class happy to do the bidding of global capital, at the expense of the Irish public. The 26 counties may be formally independent, but under the dictates of landlordism, and “free-market competition”, our people will never be truly free. We remain subject to the invisible hand of the empire of capital and EU dictates that put markets above citizens at every step. Real Irish freedom, as outlined in the democratic programme of the first Dáil in 1919, means liberation from all domination, political and economic, achieved through the public ownership of the means of production, natural resources and “wealth”; state provision of education for children and care for the elderly; ensuring that children receive food; promotion of industrial development as well as the exploitation of natural resources, and that “all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare”.
Peadar O’Donnell saw clearly that simply swapping flags or changing faces in high office wouldn’t free the people, stating that “Most of the revolutions that have taken place in history have simply been changes of management”. We won’t end the housing crisis, or poverty, or emigration by voting in new managers of the same rigged system. We need to organise to transform the social relations of the country, to ensure that Ireland’s wealth serves, first and foremost, the people of Ireland, rather than foreign capital.
The time for tinkering around the edges is over. The charity handouts, loophole-laden taxes on wealth, and polite appeals for fairness or democracy have all failed to stem this tide of inequality and injustice. We have decades of evidence now: under any capitalist government, the rich will keep getting richer and the rest of us pay the price. As we face down the interlinking crises of surging inequality, militarisation and environmental breakdown, north and south of the border, we have to organise to take matters into our own hands, in our unions, our communities, and on the streets for a revolutionary change. It’s time to rekindle the spirit of Connolly and O’Donnell, of 1916, of the great land and labour struggles, and fuse it with a bold vision for the future. We need a country that truly belongs to the people who live and work here, not to billionaires and foreign bosses.
A truly democratic nation means more than just wealth redistribution, it means true, grassroots democracy in all facets of life. It means sovereignty, by taking the government, the major wealth and resources of Ireland under public ownership, used to serve social needs instead of private greed. It means decent public housing, healthcare and education for all, meaningful work and a living wage for all, basic rights that are entirely achievable when we break the stranglehold of the profiteers, named by Connolly as capitalism, landlordism and usury. It means an Ireland that stands in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world, rather than rolling out a red carpet for genocidaires. It means finishing the fight for freedom that generations of Irish left unfinished, uniting our nation and the people of Ireland against exploitation, whether home-grown or imposed by outside powers.
We all see the direction the planet is going. We see the bloody future the ruling elite are dragging us towards as they build their bunkers, technologies and death machines. Yet we still lack the organisational structures capable of changing course. History teaches us that crisis is not only a danger but a moment of possibility: as the catastrophe of the First World War revealed in Ireland, whether such moments deepen exploitation or open the path to liberation depends on organisation, clarity of purpose and collective struggle. The trajectory of our shared future will not correct itself, and the ruling class will not relinquish power without a fight. We must learn the lessons of history, get organised, and settle for nothing less than a Socialist Republic, from the plough to the stars.
