Golden billion

The golden billion (Russian: золотой миллиард, tr. zolotoy milliard) is a term, in the Russian-speaking world, referring to the relatively wealthy people in industrially developed nations, or the West.

According to Sergey Kara-Murza, the golden billion consumes the lion's share of all resources on the planet. If at least half of the global population begins to consume resources to the same extent, these resources wouldn't be sufficient. This is partly based on the ideas of Thomas Malthus, in that emphasis is placed on the scarcity of natural resources. However, whereas Malthus was mostly concerned with finite global crop yields, anti-globalists that advocate the idea of a 'golden billion' are mostly concerned with finite natural resources such as fossil fuels and metal. According to Kara-Murza, the developed countries, while preserving for their nationals a high level of consumption, endorse political, military and economic measures designed to keep the rest of the world in an industrially undeveloped state, and as a raw material appendage area for the dumping of hazardous waste and as a source of cheap labor.

The theory which holds that the wealth of the West, including that of the lower classes, is mostly based on exploitation of the former colonies in the third world is not new in Russia, where it was first popularized by Vladimir Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin described the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, wherein the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capital. The final, imperialist stage of capitalism, originates in the financial function of generating greater profits than the home market can yield; thus, business exports (excess) capital, which, in due course, leads to the economic division of the world among international business monopolies, and imperial European states colonising large portions of the world to generate investment profits.

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