Billionaire bashing: the new class war

Paul Sheehan writes of Billionaire bashing: the new class war in that:

Class war is back. On both sides of the Atlantic. The consequences have a long way to run.

I disagree. The class war has never gone away. It is a permanent feature of Capitalism.

What has happened instead is that the class war has become visible to the general public despite the best efforts to deny its existence. This is something that is obvious to both right-wing and left-wing popular movements:

Last year, the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations pointed to a percolation of social anger. Occupy Wall Street did leave one indelible phrase in the public consciousness - “the 1 per cent” - a term which now routinely crops up in public dialogue. It is shorthand for the unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1 per cent of the population in the capitalist system, against the share of the remaining 99 per cent. It is a theme resonating in troubled Europe and also applies in China.

Here the class war is portrayed as the inequality in the distribution of wealth. Nowhere is the analysis of the reasons that give rise to the inequality.

The inequality is a natural consequence of the capitalist mode of production in which the surplus production accrues to the owners of the means of production, instead of to the producers of the commodities.