After working hard all week, you get home and try to figure out how to pay your bills and put food on the table with your meagre paycheque. Every month you barely make rent. Every year it gets harder and harder just to survive.
This is life today for millions, as a new H&R Block survey showed. It found that 51 per cent of Canadians say it’s hard to make ends meet. Another 85 percent feel that living paycheque to paycheque is the new norm, up from 60 per cent last year.
The cost of basic necessities has skyrocketed, crushing ordinary people. Since the 1970s, housing prices have gone up almost 400 per cent, while real disposable income has gone up less than 200 per cent. Food prices have soared too. In 2022 alone, they increased by more than 10 per cent. And they’re projected to increase by five per cent more this year.
And while those with a job are struggling to scrape by, some don’t even have the privilege of being exploited. Now 6.9 per cent of people are unemployed—up from 5.7 per cent at the beginning of last year. And we’ve witnessed mass layoffs in sectors like the auto industry.
The results are dire. In Canada, 3.8 million people live below the poverty line. A shocking 20 per cent of people are having to skip meals. Food bank lines and tent cities now dot the downtown of every major city.
The rich get richer
It’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong, especially because while the majority suffer, the rich live in disgusting opulence. We all know the stories of mansions and gold toilet seats, of private jets and billionaire space trips. One of the most revolting examples is that Jeff Bezos recently purchased a mega yacht for $100 million… as a support vessel for his $500-million mega yacht.
In Canada, inequality has reached a historic high, according to a new Statistics Canada report. The richest 20 per cent now own 64.7 per cent of all the wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent own only 3.3 per cent.
And the rich keep getting richer; the wealth gap is widening rapidly. The report also explained that in the past year, the top 20 per cent gained 4.7 per cent in income from wages and 7.4 per cent in income from investments. Meanwhile, the bottom 20 per cent actually lost wages.
And that’s just the top 20 per cent, who have an average net worth of $3.3 million per person. Zooming in on the super-rich gives an even starker picture.
Oxfam estimated that in Canada, a new billionaire is minted every 12 weeks. Canada now has 76 billionaires. And last year, the wealth of Canada’s billionaires was more than US$496.7 billion. Billionaire wealth grew by $190.3 billion since 2019—$113.4 billion of that in 2024 alone.
This level of wealth is almost incomprehensible, but Oxfam tried to illustrate it: “Canadian billionaire wealth could easily carpet most of Vancouver in CAN$50 notes.”
The ruling class
Inequality has been building for decades. Living standards have been in free fall since the end of the postwar boom in the 1970s.
Since then, the capitalist class has waged a ruthless class struggle to cut wages and working conditions, needing to compensate for thinning profit margins and a saturated market.
And the government helped them do it. For decades, the norm has been cuts to social services and wages while corporations get tax cuts and bailouts. Any time workers dare to fight back, the government undemocratically crushes their strike—as they just tried to do to Air Canada flight attendants on Aug. 15.
Indeed, the government nakedly serves the rich. Mark Carney, for example, has instituted an “open-door policy” to business leaders. A Business Council of Canada boss even said that he “can’t keep up with the invitations” to meet with the government. What worker can say that the prime minister has an open-door policy for them?
This is because political power comes from economic power. The capitalists control everything about when and how production happens. Through this power, they control the government and politicians, and have built a state apparatus finely tuned to serve them.
That’s what makes them the ruling class: they are the economically dominant class, own almost everything, control almost everything, and use their power to enrich themselves at our expense.
Capitalism’s gravediggers
All of this is the nature of capitalism. We—the working class—do all the real work in society. Our labour is the source of all new wealth. Yet the product of our labour is taken by a capitalist boss. Our labour enriches the capitalist class—not ourselves. Their wealth grows and grows, while we stay poor. As Marx summarized: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality at the opposite pole.”
That’s why communists fight to end the capitalist system. And it is ripe to be overthrown. As Marx explained, capitalism creates the conditions for its own destruction.
Capitalism’s relentless drive for profit means it has grown production exponentially. Society now has the wealth to meet everyone’s needs. Total wealth in Canada is $19.1 trillion. Shared equally, that would be $460,000 per person—more than enough to guarantee a good standard of living.
We need to take this wealth for ourselves, putting the economy under the democratic control of the workers, and planning it to meet the needs of the many—not the few.
Capitalism has also created the force that will carry out this task—the working class, whom Marx called the “gravediggers” of capitalism.
The working class is the overwhelming majority of the population, responsible for all large-scale production. This gives us immense power. By refusing to work, we can paralyze the economy. Using this weapon, we can carry out a revolution and end capitalism.
