The world’s abundant wealth depends entirely on the 1%.
I should probably back up and clarify.
Right now, I sit facing slightly southwest, the house at my back. The time here, in this small holler of the northern hemisphere, is early afternoon, and the sun is high and bright on a clear early Spring day. Sunlight warms the brick steps below my feet, sunlight reflects off the white porch posts, sunlight stencils in the edges of the Spruce tree shade where I hear Jays flittering and calling out warnings as two hawks swoop in slow loops in the open blue. Dandelions burst with their own sunlight imitation, Spring ephemerals are high on light in this brief leafless canopy before they store up enough energy in their bulbs to fall back asleep. Elderberry’s had leaves since February, but now I see Redbud’s pink flowers popping and Spicebush’s piñata burst of neon yellow. Cottonwoods unroll their flowers, and the understory is bright green with Honeysuckle and Privet. Laundry on the line makes use of the free heat. The days are longer, the sun setting later. The intense presence of the sun’s light marks this season in this latitude of the earth.
Everything sprouts from the sunlight, in the face of it and from the source of it. At least, all terrestrial life does. An enormous watery exception lives in the caverns of the ocean, far below the reach of dissipated light. Here are hydrothermal vents, cracks in seabed where hot water erupts from earth’s geologic movement, and here microorganisms make food in the dark by oxidizing inorganic compounds and ions. Some scientists suggest chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis, might be the oldest form of metabolism. This is far outside and below my focus here, but I mention it because what I’m saying has an edge with expanse beyond it, it’s contingent on context and mystery, the way all terrain thought is always haunted by the vast deep.
Setting chemosynthesis aside, the earth is not a closed loop system, but is fed from 95 million miles away by the nuclear fire of a slowly dying plasma star. It’s a massive input into the system, with massive being a laughable understatement. Another way of seeing this is that sunlight is an incandescent gift, given freely to this blue green rock. The plants of the planet, in an underground partnership with animal-like fungi that dates back millions of years before roots evolved, eat that sunlight, metabolize it into sugar, grow themselves, store starch in their buds and twigs and what Robin Wall Kimmerer cozily calls the “living root cellar.” That energy rises as sap and pushes buds back out this time of year, sprouting as flower, leaf, and stem to start the annual feast over again.
Sunlight and photosynthesis form the foundation of a triangle, or what ecologists depict as one. They call it the trophic structure, drawn out as a pyramid crosscut with several sections. Each level is a location in the food web, stitched by spidery links of energy transfer to the next level. Lifeforms share a level if they eat in the same ways. This pyramid oversimplifies, as all graphs and diagrams do. Some species sit at multiple levels, inhabiting diverse niches and biodiverse habitats. Some mutually prey on each other, like a predator whose prey eats the predator’s eggs, and some eat the fruiting bodies of decomposers that will inevitably break down their bodies after death. Some creatures eat plants and other creatures that eat plants, making them both secondary and tertiary consumers. That includes us, we humans who eat widely with a choice of menu. Everything eats.
This pyramid is about food. Trophic derives from a Greek word, trophē, meaning nourishment or even meal, but that can include a sense of nurture and education as well as a place where this kind of rearing happens. The trophic structure shows the place of feeding, tracking the complex metabolic pathways of eating and being eaten. On the bottom of the pyramid, photosynthesizers like plants and algae use the input, or gift, of light, often depicted as arrows of sunlight shooting up from below, to make food for themselves and pretty close to everyone else (aside from the hydrothermal vent dwellers). This group goes by the name autotrophs, also known as primary producers, because they are the first to make their own food and energy by consuming, in a sense, sunlight. Everyone on the pyramid above can’t make their own food, so they consume someone else. Everything eats.
One step up the pyramid, the narrowing inclining edges indicating a decrease in population number, are the primary consumers, all those critters that feed on the producers, the products of photosynthesizers. We call these herbivores, all those grazers and browsers of sward and wood, fruit and nectar. Then follows the secondary consumers, the tertiary consumers, collectively called carnivores eating the flesh of those that eat plants, or eating the flesh of others who eat those that eat plants. At the peak, in the small summit triangle of the pyramid, the apex predators eat the lowest diversity, high in the pyramid but low in the so-called food chain. We humans, by the way, are somewhere in the middle, sharing a trophic level with pigs and anchovies.
Each upward level depends on the one below, starting with sunlight, but not in a hierarchy. Or rather, not the simplistic hierarchy we often associate with pyramids, the shape itself and the kind of social organizing we assume is necessary to build them. Instead, this kind of structure looks more like heterarchy, which involves distinction but without rigid rank, with the possibility of their relationship changing and the lines of connection redrawn depending on need, season, and life cycle. The trophic structure is a very different kind of pyramid scheme, starting from abundance, because energy, such as light, doesn’t move like nutrients or water. It flows rather than cycles, ultimately, from warm light to entropic heat. Energy leaves this triangle in two ways: entropy and decay. Most depictions of the trophic structure show this at each level with an arrow sprouting off into empty space, representing the excess heat unused by producers and consumers. Arrows also fly off the other side to show the decomposers, those creatures that feed on the death of the producers and consumers alike, digesting their accumulated sunlight-birthed biomass, with one more arrow of metabolized nutrients returned as side dishes to feed the primary producers. The sun is the only one not fed.
What I find mind-bendingly curious, what is world-spinning astounding, is that most of the energy entering this system ends up as entropy early on. What I mean is, most of the sunlight brightening the earth doesn’t get used. Plants only use 1% of the sunlight that touches them. 99% of it burns off like steam, and each trophic level loses more. Ecologists call this the law of 10%. Of course, as is the case with most laws, actual life disobeys a little. But put simply, when one being eats another, only about 10% of the body of the eaten becomes part of the body of the eater. I read in some dry scientific account somewhere the poetic phrase “fixed into their flesh.” The other 90% breaks down through respiration or incompletely digested and passed out, sunlight becoming the air we breathe or becoming food for decomposers. This transfer of biomass, this conversion of bodies into other bodies, is called ecological efficiency, starting with the chlorophyll full bodies of plants. Plants only use 1% of sunlight, the rest bounces off or is breathed out.
That means that everything on earth, the ridiculous biodiversity we see and need for survival, depends on one of the most inefficient processes imaginable. Inefficient, to be clear, by some human standards. What a waste of good light! If only we could mine the surplus value better than these profligate primary producers.
By this measurement, there’s nothing thrifty at all about nature. I’m not opposed to thrift necessarily, if understood as making good use of little, which in this case the earth is remarkably thrifty with the amount of photosynthesized sunlight. But the primary producers themselves, the rooted beings eating light in the first place, are a far cry from thrifty. They aren’t cheapskates or models of deprivation either. The processes and elements and beings of the earth seem more spendthrift than thrifty, more extravagant and lavish. Instead, the natural world could be more accurately described as decadent, riotous, economically reckless even. An Oak might drop ten million acorns in their lifetime, but on average maybe one will lignify into a canopy tree to replace the parent, the rest picked off by consumers, decomposers, shaded out from sunlight. And still, everything else on the stages of the trophic pyramid comes from the 1% of sunlight used by the global producing population of plants. In case I’m not being earnest enough, it’s fucking astonishing.
Next to this natural pyramid scheme, that doesn’t concentrate but decentralizes through the bottleneck trunk of photosynthesis, I see a different triangle, depicting another pyramid scheme of hierarchy. The specific one I’m looking at was illustrated by a group called CrimethInc, describing itself in multiple layers: “a rebel alliance” thinktank producing ideas and actions, a banner for anonymous collective action, more mouthpiece than membership, an international network for analysis and art, copyright free in a desperate venture to build another future. The pyramid they drew is intricate and complex, puzzled together like scaffolds with a series of fresco vignettes. The levels are forged together with steel beams, taking on the appearance of a house above a street of storefronts and militarized roadblocks.
The first level is underground, showing a slaughterhouse, a sweatshop, inmates incarcerated behind bars. Above the street and a concrete wall topped with barbwire, are images of homes for sale and classrooms where some students in caps and gowns ascend from the bottom levels on a staircase bypassing the next two floors, full of car dealers and manufacturers, restaurants, shopping malls, one with smashed windows, burning trashcans, graffiti sprayed by protesters. A steeple eerily peers over the shoulder of the pyramid.
The graduating class knocks at a door, but it’s blocked by a chair tipped under the latch. The door leads into an office of cubicles; in one a man hovers over a woman at her desk, touching her shoulder. Out the window on the far side, where the arrows of decomposition or entropy fly off from the trophic pyramid, leaps a man in a suit with a briefcase spilling documents.
Another level up, there’s a laboratory, operating room, a courtroom where a Black man in an orange suit stands handcuffed before a judge. Above that, a man in a large office talks on a cellphone while pouring yellow liquid out of a window into a gutter, spilling out far below into the street foundations next to someone pushing a shopping cart full of belongings, under the bare feet of children, through slum tents, into a waterway lined with a few trees. Next door to the office is a bank vault, and facing toward the world on the outside of the wall, an advertising billboard. Above that, two white-haired people eat dinner beneath a chandelier, a portrait of what looks like one of them on the wall. Next door, a man at a podium streamed with official flags and an eagle emblem waves towards the world. Above that, on the apex of the building, a dollar sign in lights.
To the side of this structure, white text on a blue sky says, “The labor of those lower on the pyramid enriches the ones toward the top. To stay stable, the economy has to draw in more and more resources—colonizing new continents, work forces, and aspects of daily life. The resulting inequalities can only be maintained by ever-escalating force.” It goes on to say that even though we are encouraged to compete as individuals, the tiny narrow top rooms don’t have enough space for all of us, which means this fortress can’t last forever, which leads to a call to action: join forces to establish another way of life. The title of the poster is “Capitalism Is a Pyramid Scheme,” a sly play-on-words to characterize our dominant global economy as an illegal business model with promises for ever-escalating benefits and profits, but as the number of people involved goes up by recruiting new members, those profits start to accumulate at the top with the people who came up with the scheme in the first place, leaving lots of people at the bottom who invested their time and money with little to show for it.
The details in the poster are a little dizzying, hard to verbally describe, visually showing the structure of a dynamic economic system in interconnected images. It’s meant to be a contemporary update of a famous 1911 caricature of capitalism from the International Workers of the World newspaper. Other artists focus in more sharply on specific features, like a 2008 unsourced illustration called “The New Pyramid of the Capitalist System.” On the bottom a multicultural group, backs to us, stand in an oilfield saluting a massive tank rolling towards them, flanked by a multiracial unit of U.S. soldiers targeting them with assault rifles. Behind the soldiers sits a row of people on couches, comfortably watching TVs built into ballot boxes. A SWAT team and police barricade behind the screens, guarding a white man in a blue suit sitting in an armchair like a throne, backlit by the high-rise skyline of a city.
Maybe these depictions seem over the top. That’s usually how caricatures work: summing up complex features in a few recognizable characteristics. Caricatures accentuate some features we think of as quintessential, the quickly recognizable outlines that leave an impression. It could be easy, and tempting, to quibble about which features get featured, or how accurately they’re drawn, but the point is to conjure up the character with a visual glance. Even free marketers and libertarians would recognize this pyramid scheme without the labels.
What these illustrations suggest in very certain terms, or rather in very clear images, is that the global economic order of capitalism rests on extreme disparity, defended by militarized force to expand the reach of its markets and a political system dependent on the hierarchy of profits and the distraction of a large majority of people, maybe by the delusion that they can climb the pyramid scheme if they work hard enough, get educated in the right way, conflate entertainment and political power. Despite the fact that the military is multiracial, that the president in the pyramid scheme is Black, the majority of those pushed down, or holding it up, are people of color, showing the ways that capitalism uses race to easily discern where to accumulate and where to extract, always with some exceptions if the bottom lines of market demand can expand.
Interestingly, the features so many of us associate with capitalism from Econ 101, or family dinner table debates, or most popular media, aren’t the defining features here. This pyramid isn’t solely about supply and demand, about “markets and trade,” in the stereotypical way we’ve come to talk about capitalism in mainstream settings. All those elements existed long before capitalism. They don’t define how capitalism functions so much as describe some ways that it does. Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel says capitalism is more accurately defined in a few other ways. He’s written engaging detailed books on the subject, but in a Twitter thread he characterizes capitalism in three key features:
- It prevents democratic decision-making about what’s needed and how to make it, mostly reserving that for whoever owns the means of production.
- It’s the only economic system in history to depend on and organize around perpetual expansion of commodified goods for profit instead of need, made as cheaply as possible from the work of humans and land by depressing wages, attacking environmental protections, colonizing frontiers through empire and market. Without this expansion, it faces crisis, and left alone it will eat the world.
- And it’s inherently defined by enclosure and by artificial scarcity, by walling people off from the sources of subsistence, privatizing what was held and made in common, and taxing people with money they need wages to make, creating a sense of too little despite the fact that a few took more than enough. Economists like Hickel call this “primitive accumulation,” not because it’s once and done long ago, but because it’s the first or primary act of capturing, or harvesting, energy to produce wealth.
According to Hickel, this is how the pyramid gets built and maintained. Some economists and politicians would say this pyramid will, somehow, level off so the world can be flat and safe for all. But it’s hard to square that triangle with this sentence from a 2020 Oxfam report: “The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population.” The frescoes of the pyramids show how accumulation happens like a fault line along the aftershocks of colonization, and therefore race and geography, and gender. According to the same Oxfam report, the “22 richest men . . . have more wealth than all the women in Africa.” By some estimates, global females put in 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work every day, a calculation in dollars that’s three times the size of the global tech industry and the so-called information economy.
If the system is going to progressively flatten this situation, then the wrong pieces are getting flattened. Oxfam published another report, “Survival of the Richest,” in January of this year, which says that, “the richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population.” That’s up from the trajectory of the last ten years, where the 1% had captured around half of all new wealth.
I don’t need to belabor the working point of this pyramid right now, but I want to note the language in the Oxfam report of the 1% and the 99%. I remember the slogan “We are the 99%” catching on during the Occupy movement in Fall 2011, though the analysis of the numbers existed long before. There’s lots about the phrase to pick at, and plenty have. Is it really the 1% or is it the 0.1%, and either way shouldn’t we more heavily tax the affluent alongside the rich? Does the number account for upward and downward economic mobility? Shouldn’t it matter that the U.S.’ 99% isn’t the same as the global 99%? A CNBC article states that a net worth over $870,000 classifies as 1%, $93,000 as the top 10%, and just $4,000 puts you in the top 50%. Relatedly, can the slogan account for the very different class experiences of the 99%? Consider the very persistent gender pay gap or the rewidening racial wealth chasm to the point that some economists predict a racial and economic apartheid state with estimates that median Black wealth in the U.S. could fall to zero by 2053.
Most slogans, statistics, and graphs aren’t nimble enough to share this level of complexity, but that doesn’t mean the language can’t evoke something provocative. I should describe one more pyramid, because I think this one gets a little closer to connecting the trophic 1% and the capitalist 1%.
Surprisingly, it’s also the most simply and clearly illustrated. It looks like a pyramid with seven levels, but it’s called the “Iceberg Model of Capitalist Patriarchal Economies,” illustrated by Hannah Allen. The water level is a line dividing what’s above, the visible economy of Gross Domestic Product supported by a labor contract, with what’s below: the vast majority of what makes an economy work, all the invisible care and growth and birth and death and transfer that doesn’t have a labor contract but is still essential work. The small triangle at the very top is a dollar sign called Capital, below that is wage labor. That’s all that’s visible and accounted for in this pyramid scheme.
Below the water line is child labor, the subsistence livelihoods of peasant farmers, the constant care of housework (almost all, globally speaking, done by women and female people), the internal and external colonies and finally, at the bottom of the pyramid far below the visible line, nature. This drawing visualizes the feminist political economy of German sociologist Maria Mies.[i] For her, what we usually think of as capitalism is really just the official money-exchange financial system whose existence depends on the exploitation, or what she calls the “super-exploitation,” of everything under the water line: subsistence, care, the household, the children, the female, the earth. These elements are often called “externalities” in economic theory, somehow not intrinsic to the basic functioning of supply and demand, markets and trade.
In a way, though, they are external, not actually made by capitalism, not acknowledged by capitalism, but still fully fed on and reorganized by it. The household, Mies writes, “is a colony.” Patriarchy, like racism, goes beyond and comes before capitalist economies, but it also delivers “hierarchies of roles and worth that are functional to capitalism.” The pyramid iceberg depends on “abstractions of difference to devalue” those whose energy it consumes, whose work it exploits. Mies, through Allen’s artistic representation of her work, makes clear the “underground connections” of the economy.
The dollar sign floats above water in a tiny triangle, the household is a colony, the living earth at the bottom. Here the different one percents of the world sit on opposite ends of a watermark dividing what’s seen and unseen in the house. Mies, and many feminist political economists, use the language of “the household” as a site of exploitation, colonized by capital, because the labor of its care and the laborers who do it aren’t valued, ethically or financially, but still necessary to a functioning economy. The household is also exactly what an economy is. The English word comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning the management or tending of the household. Whether exploited or embraced, housekeeping is the heart of economy.
But it goes a little deeper too, down to the foundation of the pyramid, shown as trees, flowers, mountains, water, sky. Ecology and economy grow from the same tree of language. Oikos is household, logos is the word, the speech, the study of something. Linguistically, the word economy fits inside the word ecology, fitted into its flesh, the tending of the household which is the earth.
The pyramid schemes and their iceberg divisions fit inside another triangle, too. They nest, like a wren in a house sparrow’s home, inside the pyramid of eating, the trophic structure rooted in the productive inefficiency of plants. The 1% of the capitalist economy depends, in every way, on everything external to it that it exploits, which all grows from the 1% of sunlight transferred through photosynthesis into the bodies of plants. The top 1% represents one of the most lopsided fabrications of scarcity imaginable. The bottom 1% reflects the staggering abundance that goes unused, unneeded, but is still the fertile source of every wealth possible on dry land.
The pyramid scheme fits inside the trophic structure, but it doesn’t map neatly onto its categories. Some analyses may use language like pest or parasite to describe the predatory nature (there it is right there) of capitalism, but billionaires aren’t apex predators, the rich aren’t primary producers. Ecologically, apex predators are consumed, their accumulated wealth of nutrients completely redistributed through the death tax, or inheritance tax if you prefer, of the decomposers. There is no metabolic rift here, no irreparable digestive crisis like the alienation between humans and the rest of life under capitalism. As visualized by the trophic pyramid, apex predators sit at the top only because they eat so far away from the primary source of energy. The lines of relationship can be drawn differently, making the trophic structure less a hierarchy and more a heterarchy, a food web rather than a food pyramid. Apex predators regulate, in a sense, other consumers by eating them so that the primary producers of nourishment aren’t overdrawn. The exact opposite happens in the capitalist pyramid: the apex is primarily responsible for the depletion of the earth, not the vastly larger numbers of the global majority. In short, the problem is profit, not simply population.
Both one percents are inefficient, the capitalist pyramid because of the economic transfer of abundance into scarcity, the trophic pyramid because of the ecological transfer of abundance through scarce use into abundance again. Photosynthesis is primitive accumulation of a different kind, the first harvest of energy to produce all wealth, an accumulation given away.
The trophic structure is the house that all human economies, pyramids or circles or spirals or doughnuts, must fit their flesh into. There is no outside, no externality, other than the input of sunlight that has no substitution. And yet, the interior pyramid has the power to eat the trophic structure from the inside out, given the rate and scale of inequality and inequity. Some years ago, a NASA-funded study reported that over the last 500 years civilizations collapsed for two reasons: they overshoot their carrying capacity (they eat through the trophic flow’s ability to replenish) and the gap between the haves and have-nots, what the report calls the Elites and the Masses, widens catastrophically, causing the overshoot. The researchers reached the shocking conclusion that, in the coming decades, global industrial civilization could begin its descent because of ecological exploitation and the unequal distribution of wealth. Profit, not population. The authors aren’t necessarily movement organizers wearing “Eat the rich” t-shirts; they’re scientists crunching numbers and typing graphs, if that distinction matters to you.
Is it natural, then, this extraction and exploitation? By natural we usually mean inevitable. Because, of course, there’s no outside the trophic structure for us, so there’s no outside nature to compare ourselves to. We are nature arguing about what’s natural. But is it inevitable, is this just how things are? Stocks and flows happen beyond the human, boom and busts cycle in ecosystems, apex predators will always consume the biomass of consumers and the transferred distillation of photosynthesis. Eat or get eaten, a leopard can’t change its spots.
But that really has nothing to do with pin-striped suits and the economy of the 1% (or 10%, or 50%), because that isn’t a niche set in stone. The pyramid can be rearranged. The light can be redirected.
Funnily enough, this talk of 1% and 99% reminds me of an old religious story. I’m not trying to make anyone pious, but I think it’s worth a brief detour. Jesus supposedly told a parable about a shepherd who left a flock of ninety-nine sheep to find the one that wandered off, rejoicing at the return. People have found lots of ways to hear that story, and I don’t want to get lost in the weeds with that lamb. But I mention it now to note the numbers, the ninety-nine and the one.
The point isn’t a sentimental view that the economy of the 1% is just a lost sheep that needs the shoulders of a redeeming shepherd to carry it home. Although maybe that’s slightly true, since Jesus also said it’s easier for a camel to fit through a needle’s eye than for the rich to get right with God. But what about getting right here and now? Maybe, in light of two pyramids, the story of the lost sheep is that the ninety-nine don’t get lost because they stick together, or maybe they know the lost one is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and the only way back into the fold is in throwing off the ruse. Maybe the point is that we need watchful shepherds, organized flocks, and possibilities for rescue through redistribution, because the elite type of 1% isn’t a trophic structure category. It can be decomposed, which is a form of redistribution, or maybe a taxation like the law of 10% so that all that surplus value – everything produced above and beyond what’s needed to survive and thrive – moves toward entropy and decay, feeding the decomposers, returning to the roots.
We can’t take it with us, but we can set up economies that look like that decomposition. It’s a real way to eat the rich.
Eat the light and be rich, say the plants.
We eat you all, say the decomposers, we eat the rich and poor, the billionaires and peasants, the producers and consumers and apex predators and ourselves.
Let’s stretch the terms a bit and say it’s something like a social ecology of the soil. The bugs and bacteria and fungi of the radical underground economy metabolize and redistribute every resource without judgment of identity and rank, some of it circled back to feed the roots of plants while aboveground leaves open towards the sun to harvest the primitive accumulation of 1% from which all the world’s wealth trickles down.
So I flow in a circle back to where I started, sitting in the sunlight, facing southwest in the warm midday glow, ready to be eaten.
[i] All quotes from Mies come from this wonderful overview by Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey putting Mies’ pyramid in conversation with JK Gibson-Graham. Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey, “Two Pyramids: Difference in feminist political economy,” Economy and Space 52, no. 1 (2020): 237-247.
