Samuel
Johnson said that when a man is to be hanged in a fortnight it
concentrates his mind wonderfully. The inhabitants of the United
States of America have longer than a fortnight to decide whether they
would rather face a firing squad or the gallows.
There
is, however, an alternative, ‘Instead
of supporting parties whose purpose is to perpetuate capitalism,
workers in the US and elsewhere need to organise to establish a truly
democratic society of free access to all goods and services, based on
production for need not profit – socialism.’
World
Socialism Movement
‘Around
700 million people [across the world] live today in extreme poverty –
they subsist on less than $2.15 per day, the extreme poverty line.
After several decades of continuous global poverty reduction, a
period of significant crises and shocks resulted in three years of
lost progress between 2020-2022. Low-income countries, which saw
poverty increase during this period, have not yet recovered. In 2022,
a total of 712 million people globally were living in extreme
poverty, an increase of 23 million people compared to 2019.’
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty
In
the USA, 2022 figures, almost thirty million people were deemed to
living in poverty. ‘The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5
percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty.
’https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-280.html
‘Who
lives in Poverty USA? All
those who make less than the Federal government’s official poverty
threshold...
which for a family of four is about $25,700. People working at
minimum wage, even holding down multiple jobs. Seniors living on
fixed incomes. Wage earners suddenly out of work. Millions of
families everywhere from our cities to rural communities.’
https://www.povertyusa.org/facts
What
difference is the election of Dumb or Dumber going to make to their
lives, or to that of Americans as a whole. It’s capitalism that
benefits, not those who run the system on behalf of the minority
class.
The
below isThe Poverty of Capitalist Politics from the Socialist
Standard
June 2000
‘The
state has an interest in defining poverty in such a way that only a
minority are classified as poor.
It
was hardly surprising, after the depredations of war and the
austerity of rationing, that the early post-war years should have
been a period of rising expectations. This increasing optimism was
fuelled by rapid growth. The huge task of social reconstruction
soaked up labour like water in a sponge. Low unemployment pushed up
wages and that, together with the introduction of the "welfare
state", meant that the scourge of poverty seemed to be
inexorably receding. Technological advances made affordable household
items that were once the province of privilege. The mass market had
at last truly arrived: a veritable cornucopia disgorging its
superfluity of refrigerators, TV sets and automobiles. And it was
against this backdrop of rising consumption that the first green
shoots of a new kind of social protest would soon emerge—from
budding environmentalists to the hippies of the "flower-power"
generation-fulminating against the crass materialism and extravagant
excesses of the "throwaway society".
It
was in these years that a spate of books appeared which seemed to
capture the mood of the time. One such was one written by the
economist, J.K. Galbraith, called The Affluent Society (1958).
Galbraith's thesis was that we live in an age of unprecedented
affluence yet our habits of thought are still rooted in the past.
This was a past traumatised by the experience of "grim
scarcity". We need, he argued, to radically adjust our economic
thinking if we are to fully capitalise on the new prospects opening
up and avoid jeopardising what had hitherto been achieved.
It
was just as well that Galbraith saw fit to prudently qualify his
observations, restricting their scope to what he called a
"comparatively small corner of the world populated by
Europeans". Yet, it must be remembered that, at the time, even
among the developing countries, there was a widespread expectation
that the benefits of modernisation would soon "trickle down"
to everyone, heralding the end of global poverty. They had only to
keep to the same trajectory of economic development that had so
unerringly guided their ex-colonial masters towards the sweet
pastures of capitalist paradise. Little did they know what awaited
them around the corner. The 1970s' oil crisis, mounting Third World
debts and the crushing, hope-extinguishing cutbacks imposed by IMF
structural adjustment programmes soon put paid to such wishful
thinking.
Relative
poverty
But,
to be fair to Galbraith, he did not suppose that the disappearance of
"grim scarcity" in the so-called First World signalled the
eradication of poverty altogether. There remained a more intangible,
indeed intractable, kind of poverty—the "elegant torture of
the spirit which comes from contemplating another man's more spacious
possessions". "People," declared Galbraith, "are
poverty-stricken when their income, even if it is adequate for
survival, falls markedly below that of the community. Then they
cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum
necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the
judgement of the larger community that they are indecent."
This
is "relative poverty". It is often contrasted to what is
called "absolute poverty"—the kind of poverty where one
has barely enough to survive on—but, in a sense, that can be quite
misleading. Indeed, it can lend itself to the complacent conclusion
we having nothing really to grumble about; at least compared to
others less fortunate. Like a child, admonished for not eating all
their peas, we are told to remember "the starving millions in
the Third World". So we should. Not the inference that we should
be eternally grateful for living in a society that manages to put
food on our plate—providing we can afford it—is, frankly, one
that sticks in the gullet. For this is a society the vast majority
have good reason to get rid of and, perhaps, none more so than those
it lets starve in the very shadow of the food mountains it has
wilfully created.
Rather
than see "relative poverty" as something to be contrasted
to, and separate from, "absolute poverty", it can be better
understood as encompassing the latter. As the anthropologist,
Marshall Sahlins, perceptively observed:
"The
world's most primitive people have few possessions but they are not
poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just
a relation between means and ends; above all, it is a relation
between people. Poverty is a social status. As such, it is the
invention of civilization" (Stone Age Economics, 1974,
p.37).
In
short, poverty presupposes affluence just as affluence presupposes
poverty. Each only acquires meaning in and through its relation to
the other. And, paradoxically, what underpins their mutual dependence
is what enables us to analytically separate one from the other: our
experience of material inequality. In other words, we would not be
aware that we were poor unless we had reason to believe others were
better off then ourselves.
It
is conventionally assumed that it is the duty of government to look
after the "less fortunate". But if poverty is essentially
relative, how does one differentiate between those who supposedly
warrant this support and those who do not? In other words, on what
grounds are we to classify one person as "poor" and
another, "affluent"? After all, a millionaire might
conceivably be considered "poor" by the standards of a
billionaire.
One
approach might be to calculate the average income—or arithmetic
mean—for society as a whole such that all who fell below it are
deemed "poor" and all above it, "affluent". By
this token, given the highly skewed distribution of wealth in society
today, a clear majority of the population would fall into the former
category, and a small minority, the latter. However, while this
pattern of distribution remained the same, any increase in overall
living standards which the state may rely upon to improve the welfare
of its citizens would, by definition, have no impact on the extent of
poverty among them. This is because the proportion of "poor"
would itself remain unaltered. For a government committed to the
alleviation of poverty, this would pre-empt any possibility of
success on those terms and, so, may prove politically damaging.
It
could, of course, decide to significantly alter this pattern of
wealth distribution. Even so, short of everyone getting exactly the
same, the optimum outcome it could thereby hope to achieve—which,
in statistical terms, means eliminating any "skewness"
around the "mean"—would be to reduce the ratio of poor to
only half the population by this reckoning.
There
are, in any case, clear limits to a policy of redistribution that a
government cannot ignore in a competitive environment without
hindering the process of capital accumulation. In this regard, there
is undoubtedly some truth in the neo-liberal critique of the welfare
state: "excessive" redistribution, involving massive
increases in sate welfare, would impose an unacceptably high tax
burden on capitalist enterprises which would substantially reduce
their profits. That, in turn, would diminish their capacity to
mobilise capital for future investment and, hence, their ability to
compete in an increasingly globalised market.
Redefining
the poor
Clearly,
then, from the state's point of view, some other approach to the
identification of poverty is needed to circumvent these difficulties.
Ideally, this would allow it to conclude that the problem of poverty
was, by no means, widespread. An appropriate formula could then be
devised to yield just such a conclusion. By such means, a state
could, if not altogether define it out of existence, at least enable
this problem to "assume" manageable proportions. There are
several reasons why such an approach might be officially favoured.
Firstly,
the "poor" could thus be portrayed as a minority, small
enough not to appear as a serious political threat and not too large
as to overwhelm the state's efforts to render them some token
"assistance". Secondly, by defining poverty in this
arbitrary fashion, this draws attention away from a structural
explanation of poverty, allowing it to be blamed, say, on personal
"defects". Thirdly, by effectively splitting the working
population into those officially classified as "poor" and
those who are not, this facilitates the state's ideological objective
of securing their support through a process of "divide and
rule".
Since
Elizabethan times, poverty was equated with destitution. Initially,
parishes were responsible for supporting the poor but, after the 1834
Poor Law, this task was taken over by boards of "guardians",
each comprising several parishes, which were overseen by a government
commission. As David Donnison points out, paupers "had to
pass a crude kind of means test-calculated in loaves of bread—and
the relief they were given kept them alive at a standard which was
intended to be worse then the lot of the lowest-paid labourers..."
(The Politics of Poverty, 1982, p.10).
According
to Donnison, one of the main purposes of the 1834 poor law was
to "impose the labour disciplines required for an
industrial economy". Another was to mitigate the risk of
social unrest. However, the "lowest-paid labourers" were
themselves not given any assistance, and this effectively remained
the case right until 1971 when the family income supplement was first
introduced.
Then,
in the early 20th century, the meaning of poverty underwent a subtle
shift, in part instigated by Seebohm Rowntree's classic surveys of
poverty in York. Rowntree's notion of poverty involved the
formulation of a minimum income needed to ensure the reproduction of
labour power at a level of physical efficiency increasingly demanded
by industry. To that end, a simple diet sheet was prepared with help
from the British Medical Association which would ensure adequate
nutrition at minimum cost to the state. "Subsistence poverty"
was held to be a standard of living that fell below this tolerable
minimum; as such, it was distinguishable from "destitution
poverty"—or what we usually mean by "absolute
poverty"—which was simply concerned with physical survival.
From
the standpoint of the state, the advantage of setting a fixed
threshold is that it enabled it to look to a gradual rise in living
standards to lift growing numbers of the poor above a condition of
poverty without having to seriously address the vexed question of
unequal distribution. In short, it could thus hope to progressively
reap the political benefits of a society that was becoming
increasingly "affluent". However, at around about the time
that The Affluent Society was first published, an increasing
number of social scientists, led by Peter Townsend, began to question
the validity of this approach.
Townsend
and his colleagues, argued that, far from disappearing since the war,
poverty had increased. They pointed out that the "poverty line"
adopted by the then National Assistance Board (set up in 1948) was
actually lower than even that recommended by Rowntree himself.
Further, it was unrealistic to expect the poor to confirm exactly to
such a stringent spending pattern paternalistically laid down by the
state; what the state regarded as a "necessary expenditure"
was not something that could be absolutely fixed for all time but
constantly changed along with society itself. This called for a
definition of poverty that was essentially relative and thus
sensitive to the distribution of social wealth.
Their
approach was one that had been anticipated, not only by Marx, but
also, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations Smith wrote that
"by necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which
are indispensably necessary to support life but whatever the custom
of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the
lowest order, to be without". Such a sentiment was, as we
saw, echoed by Galbraith himself.
In
due course, the notion of a fixed "poverty line" was
abandoned and replaced by more relativistic measures of poverty. One
current example is what is known as "Households Below Average
Income" (HBAI) which identifies "the poor" as those
living below 50 percent of average income. But, crucially, from the
standpoint of the dominant ideology, this still retains the
assumption that the poor constitute only a minority and,
consequently, that the majority have reason to be grateful for not
being included amongst their number.
But,
in truth, that majority is impoverished. It is impoverished insofar
as it has no other option than to sell its working abilities to those
who monopolise the means of living and whose conspicuous wealth must
irresistibly provide the very yardstick by which that poverty will be
starkly exposed.
This
may not be the poverty of material destitution. But if the measure of
a human being consists in the accumulation of material possessions to
which he or she may claim the, by that token, we are demeaned. And,
ultimately, it is in this devaluation of our human worth—not simply
in the fact of material inequality but in the meaning this society
attaches to it—that we may glimpse the very essence of this
poverty.’
Robin
Cox
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/01/what-is-poverty-2000.html
