The latest figures reveal a familiar and outrageous story: at a time when society faces grim economic stagnation, the ruling class of big capital shamelessly continues to enrich itself. The average total compensation for board members of DAX companies has risen by another 3%, swelling to an obscene €3.76 million per year. This windfall comes not from productive labor but by extracting more and more from the sweat of the working people. In some companies, such as Adidas, the corporate aristocracy earns literally 95 times the average worker’s salary. Even the “low” ratios elsewhere—13 or 18 times more—are nothing to be proud of. The economic pie, meager for the masses, is gorged upon by a handful of parasites, justifying their plunder with empty talk about ‘incentives’ and ‘global competitiveness.’
It is telling that, internationally, German executives are far from the most gluttonous. In the United States, compensation reaches almost pharaonic levels—€28.5 million on average for Dow Jones chief executives, and Microsoft’s technocrat king walks off with more than €73 million in a single year. This is not evidence of success but of an utterly degenerate system where the spoils of collective labor are confiscated for the benefit of a managerial oligarchy, lubricated by capital’s insatiable lust for accumulation.
The apologetics for this mountain of money—namely, that more compensation is now “performance-based”—should fool no one. Who sets the targets? Who decides what counts as “long-term success”? The whole arrangement is a rigged game, aimed at rewarding the loyal servants of monopoly capital while disenfranchising workers and trampling every trace of equality. And what is the result? Younger generations, confronted by the transparently hollow myth of the “self-made capitalist,” are ever less inspired to climb the pyramid built on their own subjugation.
Furthermore, the gender gap persists, demonstrating the hypocrisy of capital’s empty rhetoric on inclusion and equality. Female board members, already a tiny minority in the privileged club of exploiters, receive on average 24% less pay than their male counterparts. Even within management, after stripping away the top bosses, the difference remains stubbornly at over twelve percent. Capitalism, fundamentally, cannot resolve the oppression of women. It requires and thrives on all manner of inequality to maintain its control, dividing working people along lines of gender, nationality, and every conceivable difference.
What more proof do we require of the bankruptcy of capitalism? While they clutch at ever greater fortunes, the masses endure increased hardship and insecurity. The handful of executives who dictate society’s fate are not heroes, but architects of a profound and systematic theft. They must not be envied or imitated, but swept away with the whole rotten structure they personify. Only a revolutionary transformation—rooted in the collective ownership of the means of production, planned for the people’s needs, not corporate greed—can abolish once and for all this shameful spectacle. Justice demands nothing less than the expropriation of the expropriators.