From the essay, "The Principle and System of Modern
Poverty – A Critique of the Current Debate over the Oxfam
Report" by Malcolm H. Dunn / Joseph P. Ganahl
Colloquially, the condition of poverty refers to living
conditions in which a person does not have the means of life that he needs to
satisfy his essential needs – social scientists call these “basic needs.” The
objection that poverty is always “subjective,” so it shouldn’t be treated as a
“fact” because there are different views as to when someone can be considered
“poor,” contradicts itself insofar as any problematization of the concept of
poverty assumes poverty as a fact, i.e. assumes the existence of poverty.
Moreover, the phenomena associated with poverty are no secret: if there are
people who can’t feed themselves sufficiently or have no access to clean water
and medical care, they are considered poor. But also circumstances that can be
observed daily in the industrialized countries, such as begging on the streets
or, to give another example, the talk about the working poor, testify to the
fact that there are general ideas about the condition that is referred to as
poverty. So there is no need to prove the existence of poverty. What matters is
the correct explanation of the causes of poverty. Before we address this issue,
I would like to make two general comments.
Poverty is always connected to a historic moment. If, for
example, we want to grasp and understand poverty in antiquity, we judge the
living conditions of people against the background of the means that existed in
ancient society. Nobody would think of describing the Roman emperors as “poor”
simply because they lacked the objects that are considered indispensable today,
such as mobile phones, computers, etc. This is also absurd because the needs
that are perceived to be inadequately satisfied are usually directed towards
objects that exist. The need to drink a glass of good wine presupposes the
knowledge that there is wine and that wines differ in quality. Therefore, needs
that remain unsatisfied as a result of poverty do not fall from heaven like
manna, they are concretized by the means of satisfying the needs themselves.
Therefore, if we want to explain poverty in antiquity or the Middle Ages, we
must study the living conditions that prevailed in antiquity or the Middle
Ages. The comparison with the living conditions of earlier or later periods
does not help us. If we compare the living conditions in America, Europe, or
Asia as they prevailed a hundred, two hundred, or five hundred years ago, with
the technical possibilities we find today, they appear to us backwards and
poor. But then we are no longer actually talking about poverty, but about the
“state of the productive forces” (Marx) of a society, that is, the technical,
social knowledge and means available to a society. If, on the other hand, we
speak of poverty in the true sense, then we refer to someone as “poor”
who cannot satisfy his needs in the context of his social and historical
circumstances because he lacks the means to do so.
This leads to a further peculiarity of the concept of
poverty. If poverty describes a state of deficiency which refers to objects
which are able to satisfy these needs, then these objects also exist.
They may not be available in sufficient quantities, but they do exist.
Accordingly, there are also people who have access to these goods. Therefore,
if you want to talk about poverty in a meaningful way, you cannot remain silent
about wealth. So the explanation of poverty always includes the explanation of
the material wealth from which the poor are excluded. It stands to reason that
this exclusion is not the result of a voluntary agreement. The divorce of
poverty and wealth, the exclusion of the poor from social wealth, therefore
always touches on questions of the ruling forces and political power relations
in a society.
3. The Principle and System of Modern Poverty
In all societies in human history, there has been and still
is wealth and bitter poverty. The social wealth in ancient Rome or Athens, as
still manifested today in impressive architectural monuments, contrasted with the
lives of impoverished farmers and slaves. The wealth of medieval society was to
be found among princes and merchants, while the predominantly agrarian
population lived in such poverty that farmers regularly rebelled against the
authorities. But even a “classless society” would have been relatively helpless
in the face of natural disasters during this period. As remarkable as the
farming methods used in agriculture may have been, frequent periods of drought,
flooding, and as a result poor harvests temporarily hampered the supply of
sufficient food to the population. The same applied to the control of
epidemics. As long as the pathogens and transmission of an epidemic were
unknown, even the rich classes of society had little chance of adequately
protecting themselves from an epidemic.
These causes of hunger, disease, and poverty, known as the
“scourges of humanity,” have been part of history for many centuries. The
modern form of poverty is not the result of a lack of food or means to provide
food. Today, humanity has the knowledge and technology to once and for all
eradicate the hunger and misery that we see in all parts of the world. There is
no technical obstacle to producing enough food or a basic lack of resources to
overcome hunger and poverty. Food can be stored for long periods of time and
transported to places of need. People can be relocated to earthquake-safe
areas, deserts can be irrigated, and in this way agricultural production can be
significantly increased, etc. Nobody has to die of thirst because there
is too little water on the planet. Nobody has to starve because there is no
food; nobody dies because there are no medicines. And even if in individual
cases there is not enough drinking water, food, medicines, etc., they could
easily be produced in sufficient quantities where they are lacking. This
applies not only to the leading industrial nations. Even in those countries
that are considered to be among the poorest in the world, raw materials are
mined and agricultural goods exported. If it is possible to build pompous cathedrals
like Notre Dame de la Paix in Third World countries such as Côte d’Ivoire,
which was modeled on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the fact that many people do
not even have a roof over their heads cannot be due to a fundamental lack of
resources. The scandal of modern poverty is that people are starving in front
of full department stores and warehouses.
If poverty and misery were justified simply by the lack of
food and the means to provide it, then increasing food production would be the
best way to overcome poverty and misery worldwide. If, however, there is no
fundamental shortage of food and if the technologies and resources are
available to produce sufficient quantities of food, then the worldwide
production of social wealth does not serve the purpose of overcoming poverty
and misery. If the best possible supply of all people were the social purpose
of production, as economists claim time and again, and the means to do so are
abundant, the existence of poverty in its various manifestations would be
completely inexplicable.
Let’s take a closer look at things. The purpose of
production is obvious: the production of social wealth in the modern economy
does not serve the immediate satisfaction of needs, but sales. It produces
commodities, i.e. goods that are produced for sale, for exchange with money.
But, economists will argue, doesn’t the production and sale of goods serve the
purpose of meeting needs in the best possible way? Yet things are not that
simple. For when goods are produced for sale, the useful object that enters
consumption becomes the means for a different purpose. This purpose is familiar
to everyone: when commodities are put on the market, it is about making money
out of them for the producer. Money is the means of appropriating other
people’s property. For the most part, social wealth exists as private property,
and everyone knows this. Owning private property means being able to exclude
others from using and enjoying the things they need for their consumption or
productive activity. They must give the owner money, the universal means to
have social wealth at one’s private disposal, for his commodities, and this is
what the supplier of any commodity already speculates on during its
production,. This means, conversely, that what counts as a need is by no means
the result of the need and how urgent it is, but of the sum of money at its
disposal. The need of the poor in whatever part of the world for medical care
is irrelevant in a money economy, since the poor lack the money to practically
ensure their needs; conversely, the luxury needs of the rich, such as for an
expensive lapdog collar or a luxury yacht, are extraordinarily important
economically if and because they are endowed with monetary power and promise a
lucrative business to anyone who can satisfy the need.
So people only go hungry where people lack the money they
need to buy the food that is available. The reason for the exclusion of the
poor from the available wealth is the institution of private property that
rules in modern societies. In (almost) every country in the world, the
political power decrees that some citizens possess material wealth, while the
majority of the population is denied access to this wealth. It is always
important to realize that in modern society, exclusion from material wealth by
property rights is not limited to consumption goods in the strict sense. The
sources of material wealth, the material means of production, the machines and
tools, raw materials, the land, etc. that is needed to produce these
commodities, are also private property, owned by a class of private
owners.
So the modern poor person is someone who is doubly free: he
is free in the sense that he has free command over his labor power, which
belongs to him because he is neither a slave nor a servant. But he is also free
in the sense that he can’t use this labor power productively for himself,
because he is “liberated” from the sources of wealth, since the means of labor
necessary for it belong to others. This leads us to the second peculiarity of
modern poverty. The legal separation of the poor from social wealth is not a
one-off act, but a constantly recurring process: if someone is dependent on
money to satisfy his needs, but has no money or monetary assets, then he must
earn it. In addition, he brings to the market the only piece of private
property that is suitable as a source of income, his human labor power. It is
no secret to whom this commodity is offered for sale. Those who are in
possession of the means of work or who have concentrated financial wealth are
interested in “having their money work for them,” as the saying goes. The
search for a job on the part of the wage earners is confronted with the demand
for labor on the part of the money owners. The criterion for hiring someone,
however, is not the jobseeker’s need to earn money, but the business interest
of those who seek to increase their financial wealth and who may or may not
demand labor. Their economic interest decides whether and who works and under
what conditions. The work must be “profitable” or else there is no demand or
use for it. The profitability calculation is quite banal: employment is only
worthwhile if the income generated in this way exceeds the costs paid in the
form of wages, among other things. The higher the returns from labor at the
same cost, or the lower the wage costs at the same return, i.e. the greater the
difference between the two monetary amounts, the more lucrative the work is for
the actual user of the work, the entrepreneur. This means that the lifetime
earnings of the worker is treated as a cost item to be minimized by the “job
creator” who uses the work. His profit interest conflicts with the interest of
the workers he employs.
So not only are large parts of the population in all modern societies
excluded from the sources of wealth by property rights, but the destitute are
made into the means for increasing the wealth of others, and as things stand,
the beneficiaries of work can be certain that the economic pressure of earning
money has replaced the direct compulsion to work which slaves and servants were
subjected to. Because compared to the condition of not having any wage income,
the condition of being “allowed” to work mostly seems to the poor to be “good
luck,” even when the wage is not enough for a good life. For the users of labor
power, the functionalization of the poor is good luck, this time without
quotation marks. Their wealth grows precisely to the extent that labor’s yield
grows, and wages must always be modest and must remain modest for business to
flourish. And that is what matters for a flourishing business system based on
the productive use of poverty, on wage labor, and for producing a money surplus
for the state to participate in. No wonder, then, when the representatives of
“the economy,” the political elites and the economic wise men in this country
warn, in every economic phase, against “excessive” wage demands which endanger
the competitiveness of the location and thus “jobs.” And that’s true, too, if
one treats the condition for jobs – a profit has to come about for the user
of labor power – as an economic constraint that nobody can do without.
Then the criterion of profitability also determines whether jobs are created
or, conversely, whether they are cut.
4. The cause of extreme poverty in many developing
countries
The principle of modern poverty – the exclusion of the poor
from social wealth by property rights and their instrumentalization for
increasing the money wealth of a class of property owners – is in force
worldwide: the small farmers of Latin America, Africa, and Asia are displaced
from fertile soils for dam building, plantation expansion, or the exploitation
of mineral resources. The poor fight for their daily survival on the bad and
inadequately irrigated fields that they may still be left with. In the cities
of many developing countries, craftsmen have no chance of withstanding imported
commodities, no matter how cheaply they are willing to work, because they can’t
afford modern tools and machinery. In all these cases, the poor are poor
because they are excluded from the means of production necessary to earn a
decent income. In order to earn money, many are forced to market their labor.
There is also no difference with regards to the states of the so-called Third
World. Like the industrialized nations, they see the productive use of poverty
as the means of their own progress. They fight the poverty they have created by
offering the poor to international companies as cheap labor. But whether this
business use of the poor comes about and whether the poor even receive a wage
from which they can make a living is a completely different matter. For neither
the need of the states for as much profitable employment as possible nor the
interest of the poor in an income from which they can make a living is
decisive. Employment and wage levels in developing countries also depend solely
on whether companies, including international corporations, expect high returns
from employment, measured against other investments in other countries that
also offer themselves as production locations.
The same criterion that determines the level of
employment and the level of wages in the industrialized countries, when applied
to the developing countries, leads to the vast majority of the population not
receiving a regular wage income and, when wages are paid, they are often not
sufficient to satisfy even the most elementary needs. This is because
investment in these countries is often judged to be unprofitable or too risky
when measured against the return prospects in other parts of the world, which
is why business involvement concentrates, if at all, on areas where favorable
natural conditions make an investment profitable. For example, large
corporations invest in the cultivation of so-called cash crops or in the mining
of mineral resources for which there is strong demand. Tourism also contributes
to business in a few countries. Apart from these sectors, there is no
profitable use for the majority of the population. This part of the population
tries to survive somehow. Maybe the poor try to wrest a few agricultural fruits
from the little fertile land that is still left to be used, or maybe they try
to make a living from fishing, which is becoming more and more difficult because
the coastal waters have been fished empty by large fishing trawlers. In the
slums, the poor keep their heads above water by waste recycling, poorly paid
services, petty crime and prostitution. In other cases, the poor take the risk,
if they have the means at all, to emigrate in the hope of earning a decent
income abroad to feed their families at home.
If the survival of the destitute poor depends on their labor
being used productively to increase the private wealth of an owning class, then
their non-use causes extreme poverty, which is hard to escape. Measured by the
prevailing system of calculation, these poor people then belong to an overpopulation.
Not only are they poor, they are “too many.” The affected states of the
developing countries thus face problems of order, which they have to keep under
control to prevent the “investment climate” from suffering; the leading
industrial nations are confronted with a refugee problem, which they demand the
developing countries solve.
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