Global Billionaires and Geographical Justice: From Bonanza to Bust?

In March 2025 it was reported that five of the world’s richest men, including those who stood behind Donald Trump on his inauguration just two months earlier, had between them lost over $200bn of their wealth in around 50 days. That was not the plan. And there definitely was a plan. We see the plan being enacted every day on our news.

Audio recording of a talk given by Professor Danny Dorling (University of Oxford) at the University of Bristol on 10 June 2025. Professors Vicky Canning (Lancaster University) and Roger Burrows (University of Bristol) were discussants. Note: audio levels vary.

In his talk, Professor Dorling charted how the wealth of the extremely rich grew; how enough is never enough and you can always feel you are missing out; and why the richest of all were so worried for their futures that they backed Trump so ferociously. What was it that the billionaires feared the most? How did they think they could secure that? And with almost all of the world looking on with horror at the US — could their actions actually, if inadvertently, help accelerate progress towards a more equal planet?

Drawing on his book The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future Professor Dorling sounded a note of optimism: “Progressive politics tends to win. Things go wrong; we have to address them. We don't yet know how we can address the billionaires. But the great thing is, there are very, very few of them, and they might annoy you, but they also annoy people much, much better off than you. They're concentrated in just a few countries. They're not being allowed to behave in this way in many parts of the world – such as China. It is entirely possible to completely ban the software which is collecting all your data that you send – your personal, private messages to your loved one – for nothing. It is perfectly possible to say that's not tolerable. It would be wonderful if the EU could get its act together and start to control Amazon, ideally to simply nationalise it. Control Facebook. Control X. Declare them all publishers, hold them legally liable for what they do. That may sound like a pipe dream to you, but just think what we did with the aristocracy. If you have a look and see how many dukes are left, they're absolutely no good at breeding. We are running out of dukes in this country, and they used to control it.”

Professor Roger Burrows said he is less optimistic than Dorling. “I've been very perplexed by the lack of state theory in recent years. In the 1960s, 1970s, there was the Miliband–Poulantzas debate about the nature of the state. Ralph Milliband, the father of the Miliband brothers, seemed to think it was all about who elites knew and who they went to school with, and if only we could capture the state, we would have a big impact. Poulantzas came along and said, ‘It doesn't matter who these people are. We need to understand the structures and the role of the state.’ He says the role of the state is to be relatively autonomous from different fractions of capital, because the role of the state is always to act in the interests of capital – in general, in the long run. My thesis is that the state's no longer relatively autonomous. It's been captured by a particular fraction of capital. Industrial capital is pissed off. Other forms of petty bourgeois capital are pissed off. It's been captured by Blackstone capital; billionaire Kiel Musk Zuckerberg capital. They've captured the state. They're in the state. The state's acting in the interest of that particular fraction of capital, and it's going to be a disaster.”

Professor Vicky Canning said: “I'm concerned that billionaires are more tolerated and more appreciated than we would like, however ridiculous we think Elon Musk is, after many years of normalisation of wealth, and the more people are happy to invest in immigration detention, in militarisation. These are things that we have to confront as academics, researchers, activists. It is incredibly predictable that, given conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, that there was always going to be mass movements of people to safety. Instead, more than 35,000 people have died in the Mediterranean alone since 2014. That brings me back to a point brought up in The Next Crisis, which is freedom. What is freedom if we have such a disparity between wealth and poverty and the victims of wealth? I really like that term, because we often think of poverty as something that just sits as separate to the grades in which people get to live their lives and the disparity of income that people can enjoy or unenjoy, when actually, the victims of wealth is what we should be thinking about. Those who are held in immigration detention are also the victims of wealth; and those who are losing their lives in what would arguably be defined as genocide in Gaza are also the victims of wealth through the arms trade.”

Read more about The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future
https://www.dannydorling.org/books/th...