IN the middle of the first half of the past century, the children of poor families who managed to attend university were held spellbound by the passion of Marxist professors who preached the dawning of a new era. Capitalist societies, they taught, were teetering on the verge of collapse “while socialism is surging to worldwide victory.” The inevitable emergence of a fair and egalitarian society, in which social classes and hierarchies vanish, and where the son of a sharecropper like myself would have a social and economic status on par with the children of feudal landlords, was indeed a tantalizing one.
From that stage of socialism, the professors said, the next radical evolution would be the “withering of the state,” creating in the process a classless society anchored on absolute fairness.
History, however, was unkind to Marxist historical determinism.
The euphoria after the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 tragically segued into the horrors of Stalinism and not into that promised land of a classless state. (Could Leon Trotsky have carved a different path had he triumphed over Joseph Stalin in the post-Lenin leadership struggle? Who knows?) Mao Zedong’s own triumphal march into the capital after “encircling the city from the countryside,” in 1949, led to the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Even under his unquestioned leadership, China did not even come close to becoming a fully functioning socialist state.
China today is a hybrid socialist-market economy and the biggest global economy when measured by purchasing power parity. The other measurement is nominal gross domestic product, in which the United States is the undisputed world’s biggest.
Deng Xiaoping, who steered China to a proto-market economy after Mao, summed up China’s global ambition: to be rich is glorious.
Today, what was once a tantalizing prospect of a fairer, egalitarian society in Marxist utopias has been rudely shattered by the clear triumph of what Marx has denounced as the root of all social and economic evils: unfettered capitalism. Today, there are hardly Marxist professors left, and the few hardcore Marxists in the academe are struggling to explain why such grand theories as labor’s surplus value, the unity of the opposites and the inevitability of class struggles in exploitative societies have been rendered almost irrelevant by the sheer staying power of market economies.
Today, there are probably more billionaires on the planet — 3,000 at the end of 2025, according to poverty tracker Oxfam — than Marxist academics. And the scale of their wealth is totally unprecedented, magnifying in the process the vast chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The lords of industry and the captains of finance in the earlier Gilded Age cannot compare with the current level of wealth in the hands of, say, a handful of tech overlords dominating today’s superrich.
These 3,000 superrich, Oxfam says, control wealth totaling $18.3 trillion — an obscene level. The top 12 billionaires alone, mostly US-based “tech bros,” hold more wealth than 4 billion people, or about half of the global population. Half of the global population, meanwhile, live in poverty of the dire, intractable kind.
“The widening gap between the rich and the rest is creating a political deficit that is unsustainable,” said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s international executive director.
“The superrich have not only accumulated what they could ever be spent. They also used this wealth to secure political power to shape the rules of our economies and societies for their own gain. And to the detriment of the rights and freedoms around the world,” Oxfam said.
Oxfam’s statement is an unalloyed statement of fact about the outsized power of billionaires in Philippine society. The great economic divide between the superrich and the rest has earned the country the embarrassing distinction of having the most unequal society in Southeast Asia. The Philippines, whose economy is also dominated by a few dollar billionaires, is also the 15th most unequal society in the world.
The World Bank said that, of the total yearly income gains, 17 percent is vacuumed up by the top 1 percent. Those at the bottom 50 percent have to grab whatever they can from the 14 percent that accrue to them.
In the Philippines, the state has been pampering the rich with favorable policies and feeding the poor with “ayuda,” instead of pre-redistribution policies that permanently lift human capital. Rock-bottom corporate income tax rates, almost nonexistent implementation of regulatory policies, grant of lucrative franchises to favored corporate cronies, the feckless rulings of the Philippine Competition Commission and the appointment of billionaires to critical Cabinet positions. Billionaires are routinely placed in powerful government posts, from where they can shape critical state policies in their favor, just like what Oxfam has pointed out.
The last legislative proposal to rein in the economic — and political — power of billionaires through strong antitrust legislation was initiated by then-senator Teofisto Guingona Jr., and that was in the Eighth Congress in the late 1980s. It went nowhere.
Endlessly pandering to the demands of the uber wealthy, a succession of governments had enabled capital through pro-billionaire legislation. What’s more, a slew of liberalization laws passed during Rodrigo Duterte’s administration giddily gutted what was left of the patrimony and equity provisions in the Philippine Constitution, effectively creating a government for, of and by the billionaire class.
