[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about why only tinkering with the root causes of poverty and its resultant HR violations leads us to dead-end streets. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–“If you have no choice, you get screwed”.
Why do so many people live in poverty? Well, because so many rich people benefit from it
1. Employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunities for themselves. For example, the rental market is just utterly brutal, especially for the poorest. (Landlords in poor neighborhoods make more than landlords in affluent neighborhoods). And then, we have all these anti-poverty programs that only accommodate poverty without really disrupting it; they are not even remotely tackling poverty at its real roots.* Let’s face it: A lot of us benefit from poverty; we consume the cheap goods and services that (an often exploited) working class produces for us. (Matthew Desmond) [I could rest my case here, but data are even more overwhelming].
*: In the midst of the globalization process, the fight against poverty is an exercise in futility: The root of the problem is not poverty, but affluence. (Theo Ruyter)
The world could have several more dollar billionaires in less than a decade, but it would take more than 200 years to eradicate poverty (Oxfam International).
2. The current world economic system is a gigantic machine for taking wealth from below and moving it up the social pyramid in the most brutal class warfare on record –and the owners’ side is mercilessly beating the workers (and destitute migrants). Reality incontrovertibly refutes the neoliberal myth that economic growth automatically translates into reductions in poverty and, therefore, it is enough to let market forces work to solve all the world’s ills. The reality is that the benevolent hand of the free market is a fiction fed by the privileged and their mouthpieces –the transnational media– in order to keep the immense majorities asleep, impoverished and precarious, in order to finance the plutocracy. Enrichment is not, as orthodox economists maintain, the result of innovation and process optimization, but of plundering. (Isabella Arria) Swallow that and you may become a human rights (HR) advocate (or activist?).
For centuries, capitalism has given a minority the profits while leaving millions of others destitute.
3. The moralistic idea that we are all partly to blame for this ignores the systemic causes of poverty. Yes, we benefit from poverty primarily through the labor exploitation that gives rise to cheaper consumer goods. There are many ways in which the well-to-do are subsidized. Take, for example, tax breaks and tax evasion…**
**: Keep in mind that illicit financial flows do not just include criminal elements, but also include the unethical or immoral elements where the well-to-do use loopholes in tax systems.
4. There is thus a lack of attention to the nature of capitalism and its inherent contradictions in the genesis and perpetuation of poverty with its myriad HR violations. This implies that there are still hundreds of thousands among us that are anti-poverty and yet pro-capitalism while, if we accept the preceding sentence, the real matter is to push for a movement of anti-capitalists instead of the quite more frequent poverty abolitionists.
5. Mind you, the welfare state has never been about eradicating poverty. Rather, its primary function was and is to create the social conditions necessary for capital accumulation to proceed uninterrupted. To create a system whose primary goal is mass poverty eradication simply necessitates the overthrow of the capitalist state —hence the need to be anti-capitalist in order to be meaningfully anti-poverty. (Clark Randall)
Misery, when endowed with an idea, is a most powerful revolutionary force. (Victor Hugo)
–It is true that those rendered poor have little money, but there are so many poor who ought not wait forever for the definition of what the rich impose as a decent wage. (Louis Casado) [Remember the slogan: Divided we beg, united we demand].
6. Solutions will finally come only when claim holders in the world wake up, unite and move forward despite the foot-dragging pseudo-solutions implemented by rich duty bearers and/or their defenders. Particularly claim holders in the South ought to proactively move forward with or without the ‘progressives’ in the countries in the North.***
***: “Even the US plutocrats will realize that it is better to pay the modest price of fighting poverty and climate change than to face a world that rejects their greed and belligerency”. (Jeffrey Sachs)
Bottom line: Necessary but not sufficient, economists must return to serving society
7. The discipline has become detached from its own basis, which is the study of human welfare. But the ‘great economic minds’ (the libertarian monetarists) of our time have silenced those who think differently. There is a firm libertarian belief that inequality is not an appropriate field of study for economists, so politicians and right-wing economists crunch the numbers so they can claim that the war on poverty is being won.
8. But consider: The way poverty is measured means that the war on poverty can never be won by sending money to the poor. Put another way, the war on poverty has become a war on the poor. Our governments often do not protect ordinary people, but instead help the predatory rich impoverish ordinary people. The political system responds more to the needs of those who finance it than to those of the majority of its constituents, so we continue with an economy organized for a minority to take advantage of the majority. Be careful: we run terrible risks! (Nobel laureate Angus Deaton) Food not for thought, but for action.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
—A couple reminders: In 1971, the first UNCTAD list of ‘Least Developed Countries’ counted 25 extremely poor countries. In 1991, there were 52 already, and until now, only 6 countries ‘graduated’ and 46 are still on the list. In other words, there are, today, more very poor countries than fifty years ago. And as for their debt service, it more than tripled since 2011 and absorbs 5 to 13% of the value of their exports. Further, as regards poverty reduction, let us not forget that the world’s poverty reduction, since 1981, is mainly the result of China’s efforts!). The bleak outlook for the poorest countries could make us forget that some countries did do well these past decades. The foremost example is obviously China, but also Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico and some others.
—Oxfam states that, since 2020, the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth –nearly twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. A tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty and fund a global plan to end hunger. Lessons learned from the past are several: a) development in terms of HR remains a worthy goal (never forget that development necessarily comes from within and can never be brought from the outside); b) interdependence is a primary condition for peace and requires a well-functioning multilateral system (the international institutional order should be examined and transformed from this perspective); c) neocolonialism has been very damaging (‘the West’ is responsible for this damage); d) people continue to be subdued and exploited; and e) growing South-South cooperation is very positive. (Francine Mestrum)
—Let me finish with five short quotable quotes I love:
- The poor themselves sometimes fall into the deception of a world that is not built for them. (Pope Francis)
- God said: We must share; the rich shall have the food, the poor shall have the appetite. (Coluche)
- There is a social class that thinks more about money than the rich: the poor! (Oscar Wilde)
- ‘Lost cities’, ‘callampas’, ‘villas miseria’, ‘favelas’ are all the same; either you live there, or you are one of those guilty of their existence. (Carlos Fuentes, ‘Adam in Eden’) …and those who adapted to living there, survived; but many were not able-to and died. (Primo Levi)