“Klein issues warning on sharing the wealth,” read yesterday’s Globe headline. At last, someone got to the nub. We’re gonna miss Ralph when he’s gone. It’s always about sharing the wealth — or not.

All the recent economic discussions evade this: The report on ending poverty, the one on rejigging federal-provincial finances, the Globe articles on fiscal imbalance, arguments over equalization. They debate how governments should spend their money. But governments only funnel social wealth, which is created by the joint efforts of individuals. Underneath is another battle. Economic issues are basically social. The key is always: How does a society choose to distribute its wealth?

In other words, it’s about distribution and redistribution; the struggle for the pie, in its fixed, expanding and contracting parts. This is sometimes known as class conflict. The latest Bush tax cuts in the U.S. dole out (i.e. redistribute) $70-billion, and 87 per cent goes to the 14 per cent of households at the top; 22 per cent goes to the 0.02 per cent earning more than a million a year. This reallocation of the pie toward the upper strata has been the main result of “liberal” reforms everywhere.

What do you end up with? Sao Paulo. I know it’s hard to remember because it happened last week. Gang leaders of a group called PCC inside prisons set off riots because they didn’t want to be transferred to distant prisons where they’d have a harder time running their outside crime operations. Brazil has had enormous upward redistribution of wealth. Crime gangs are a way to steal back some of what was stolen, er, redistributed. I’m not justifying it, I’m saying it’s what you get. Police in Rio in the 1990s had death squads that dealt with child poverty by eliminating it in a literal way. Maybe some of the kids who survived decided they’d better get organized, and ended up in gangs like the PCC.

There’s now a Robin Hood gang in Germany that raids gourmet food shops and redistributes foie gras to the indigent. In fact, I know a seven-year-old who recently got a note from the current sheriff of Nottingham (yes, Virginia, he still exists) saying: Let me know if Robin Hood is near you. He must be feeling the zeitgeist. In your dreams, sheriff, said the seven-year-old.

In this light, yesterday’s conviction of Enron’s Ken Lay misses the point. He was found guilty of breaking the law while amassing an obscene fortune. The real crime lies in being allowed to get so rich while others are in need. But that’s a matter for a society to deal with, not a court.

You’d have to plan and redistribute. You’ll always screw it up and make mistakes, but you can get it partly right and thus save some civility and some civilization. What I’m talking about is waging a kind of civil, non-violent class war, the sort that is going on anyway.

It can be done. The Toronto Star‘s Sandro Contenta recently reported from Sweden. There, 50 per cent of GDP goes to taxes, and the GST is 25 per cent, but even the right-wing parties buy it because society at large does. What they get in return is broad equality without vast wealth and income gaps. Are you thinking drab, grey and Soviet?

Wrong. What you can get is IKEA, a Swedish invention. I shopped there last weekend. What a place. Style and taste for the masses — like the vision of William Morris, a 19th-century English socialist who designed fine furnishings and fabrics he wanted the working masses to have access to.

IKEA is Morris plus meatballs. In most industrial societies, the majority of people increasingly get to exercise their taste by choosing toppings for their sub sandwiches, not sophisticated stuff for their homes. Or second homes, of which Sweden has the highest per capita ownership in Europe. Tell that to Torontonians looking forlornly north toward cottage country and the forbidding costs of ever owning a place there unless you’re filthy rich.

Marx and Engels opined that all history had been about class struggle, i.e. dividing up the pie. Of course, it’s a sloppy generalization and therefore meaningless. But (to paraphrase Woody Allen on sex without love as a meaningless experience): As sloppy generalizations go, it’s one of the best.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.