[Adapted and translated from Gegenargumente Vienna 5 April 2005]
It is well known that there is a lot of poverty in the rich countries of the world. Teams of sociologists are entrusted by their governments with the task of counting and classifying the poor, comparing their numbers to the poverty of earlier years and representing these results in bar charts and other graphic formats. These findings are widely reported and become part of the democratic debate. However, these researches do not want to explain poverty, but to measure it. And knowledge of the existence of poverty is no explanation.
The national standards define poverty as something that exists apart from an existing prosperity - a prosperity that is not simply at the disposal of the members of the society. If they must still earn their share of this wealth, they are obviously in principle completely excluded from it. Poverty in the market economy is not to be mistaken with a social lack, with a lack of productive forces. If there is poverty and undersupply near existing wealth it is because the care of the members of the society is not at all a purpose of this society.
In addition, the poverty-measurers define poverty by income. Nothing more is said about whether and what one can afford and what one must do in order to obtain this income by this insane “indicator.“ By defining poverty by income, the authors omit differences and conflicts between the different sources of income. Instead of capitalists and wage laborer, instead of those who push through their purpose and those who must arrange their lives according to them, in this picture there are only income recipients who earn more or earn less. Instead of measuring poverty by the existing social wealth - the gigantic productive power in nearly deserted factories - their definition is based on what the average wage earner earns. Wages and their size, which are not even guaranteed, are supposedly the purpose of capitalistic production, and thereby the crucial yardstick for poverty or wealth. Those who earn more than the median income are counted as wealthy. Everyone who has more than that is not poor - completely independently of what he or she can actually afford. In addition, the authors of the poverty studies do not want to let those who lie beneath this arbitrarily established threshold to be considered simply as poor. They are not poor, but at "risk of poverty"!
For the poverty researchers the reason for poverty can never be wage labor. “Poverty risk” only begins when one cannot find wage labor any longer, is unemployed, has a physical handicap or care of children prevents work or because one has left working life behind as a retiree. Why for some having children or becoming old should be occasions for poverty when others make do quite well with children or getting old is completely unclear.
Poverty researchers are concerned with the consequences of class society and intentionally refrain from finding that there are consequences to class society. The poverty researchers believe that a “normal wage” income is the opposite of poverty. The wages that capital pays are one great source of income! They make the normal, necessary circumstance of life as a wage laborer responsible for special forms of poverty (the “working poor”, etc.), in order to disclaim the reason for their subject - class conflict.
Poverty is a necessary component of capitalism that does not express a failure of this economy, but on the contrary is evidence of its success. Therefore, a little explanation:
When poverty is talked about, everyone usually immediately thinks of homeless people, beggars and all the other manifestations of poverty that are not unknown to the “modern urban landscape” at the beginning of the 21st century.
These cases of a shortage of money that threaten a person’s whole existence are only part of a much more widespread and continuous struggle to live within limited purchasing power. Homeless people in the front of empty apartment buildings and beggars in front of full stores are nothing but personifications that bare witness to a valid principle of capitalist societies -- the principle that needs that are not solvent are not met.
If in this society everything that one needs to live, without exception - food, housing, up to the means of production – is property, and one approaches the objects of need only if one is willing and able to pay the price demanded by the salesperson, then the conclusion that this society is not concerned with supplying its members with what they need is appropriate. The gigantic wealth that is produced is not produced in order to satisfy the needs of the members of society, but only for the purpose of using the solvency existing in the society to transform manufactured goods into money. For this reason nothing is produced for needs that are not solvent.
How much can be earned from the available sources of income invariably stands as if in inverse relation to the needs for which one works. Every new child, each case of illness, accident or divorce does not lead to an adjustment of income to the new circumstances. Whether and how much is earned on a job depends exclusively on the cost/benefit calculation of the entrepreneur who employs the worker.
Needs are not served but used in this society. The needs of the individuals are the means to extort services from those who have no other property to call their own except their ability to work for wealth which they are excluded from. This normal poverty, which already carries within itself the germ of an endangered existence, only becomes striking in a homeless person or beggar - who is then seen as the victim of unpredictable vicissitudes of life.
The free market poverty, the exclusion from the wealth set by property, presents itself in practical life as a relation between attainable income and prices to be paid. The entrepreneurs determine both - incomes and prices - according to their calculations.
The existing poverty has nothing at all to do with a wrong distribution of wealth, as is usually maintained by the critics of poverty. In a free-market economy wealth is not distributed wrongly or in an unfair way; it is not distributed at all. Only by purchase can one access real material wealth, the objects of need. And the money necessary for it is also not distributed, but must be earned. How the individual earns money is left up to him, within the framework of laws set by the market and the state.
There is only this one market for earning incomes for the price amounts; no other relationship between the produced wealth and the lives of people takes place. The existent poverty is therefore not the result of a wrong distribution, but the economic result of sources of income being more a limitation than a source and that make the prices for the existing wealth exorbitant for those who need things.
Lack of money is the norm and not the exception for that large mass of the population that is dependent on wage-earning employment. This source of income does not cause this notorious shortage of money only when a job is lost.
What is considered to be prosperity for wage laborers - a car, dishwasher, microwave and whatever else is enumerated to illustrate this supposed prosperity -- all this is not evidence of luxury in the employee’s budget, but serves in truth as absolutely necessary means in an economic and time-limited life as flexible, at-any-time-available cogs of capitalistic business.
A voucher for the continual shortage of money in proletarian households is the wide-spread art of budgeting, although wage laborers pride themselves on this as a high virtue instead of becoming critical about the permanent necessity for the additional effort needed to provide for their private lives after work. The notorious price comparisons and constant hunt for bargains are not considered by them as badges of poverty but as an opportunity to prove their talents and cleverness in dealing with the world. The retail trade also knows about this constant shortage of funds on the part of its customers when it advertises prices with all kinds of mental hemorrhages so that they can steer whatever solvency exists in wage earners’ households into their coffers.
These connoisseurs in the arts of living who are so busy organizing their private lives do not want to recognize their poverty and lack of money. It begins for them only with unemployment. Besides, this alleged exception just proves that already employment is not suited for anything, if even without unemployment there is never anything left of their earnings than what they need for covering their current expenses so that they can never succeed in forming a reserve of savings to provide for those emergency situations which will occur in all certainty, despite all the arts of budgeting.
This shortage of money is the consequence of the fact that wages are not paid to make a living possible for getting along, but only for the labor performance bought with it that makes the paying enterprise richer. Because a wage is paid only for the capacity to work, the purpose of making this advance of money increase is fulfilled better the smaller the wages that are paid, which can never be too low. Wages always mean shortage of money for the wage laborers because for the enterprises they are always an expense to be lowered. The result is therefore already certain even before one begins to work: Work makes one poor! Or: the poor become ever poorer, the rich always richer! What else?
Someone who must work for wages is with certainty a non-owner of the production process and its yields. Therefore poverty is not simply a question of more or less income. It is the reverse. The quantitative differences are the consequence of the qualitative conflict between wage labor and capital.
The basis of this production relation is the private property guaranteed by the state. Those who do not call anything their own except their ability to work are separated from all the means needed to perform the work necessary for their own reproduction. Opposite them stand those who, in contrast to the poverty of the actual non-owners, own the productive powers of the society. With private property the state therefore establishes an extortion relationship of its own kind, an extortion relationship that makes the non-owners useful to property from which they are excluded.
The people who must work and who want to work can do this only if an entrepreneur might need their work for enlarging his wealth. In the words of Karl Marx: “The worker produces not for himself, but for capital. It is therefore no longer sufficient that he produces at all. He must produce surplus value. The worker is only productive if he produces surplus value for the capitalist or serves for the self-utilization of capital.“ (Capital V. 1) The wage earners can perform the work necessary for themselves only if they create surplus value. They must compile more than their living costs, their wages; they must compile a profit over their wages. If the work is not useful for gaining an entrepreneur a profit, then the necessary work for ensuring the living of people simply does not take place.
The poverty of the property-less stands at the inception of capitalistic production; their destitution is its necessary precondition. Only this destitution leaves them in the situation of being extorted so that they have to increase others’ wealth for wages so that they are allowed to earn their own living.
Capitalist production does not eliminate this poverty, but reproduces it on an ever-larger scale -- their work does not make the workers richer but only increases the capital from which they are excluded and which commands them.
With the success of capital the size of its profit requirements grows. Employment and employment security do not grow thereby as well. Rather the contrary is true: with the success of capital the uncertainty of those who must live on wages grows.
The capitals grow in competition with each other. They mutually contend between themselves for business success. In addition, they lower the price of the goods they produce, undercut the competition and so ensure that what exists as solvent demand is their own profit and not the competition’s.
In order to lower prices, the entrepreneurs continually increase the productivity of the work that they buy. They constantly organize new machinery that is worked more productively, thus produces in less time the same amount of products or in the same time produces more products than ever before. They make the work cheaper for themselves by saving on paid work through increasing the productivity of work.
In capitalism the increase of productivity does not serve to save work. This increase serves rather only to save paid work for the entrepreneurs. Enterprises invest, lay people off and have the reduced number of workers manufacture just as much product as, or more than, yesterday’s larger staff.
Profit making -- and not too little of it -- is the reason for poverty; and the growth from yesterday -- not too little of it -- is the reason for unemployment today. Unemployment is, as it were, the perverse wage that the system pays to its workers for the always-rising productivity of their work. The enormous number of superfluous workers, the degree of their misery, is almost a badge for the productivity reached by work, the human source of material wealth.
Poverty exists not despite, but because of, the workings of the state. It is only the state that with the warranty of private property guarantees the crucial basis for capitalistic production and thus poverty -- the exclusion from the existing wealth. Or, as it is called in the book “The Democratic State:“
Private property, the exclusive disposal over the wealth of society which other individuals require for their subsistence and must therefore utilize somehow, is the basis of individual advantage, and naturally also of disadvantage. It is the source of the modern form of poverty, whereby people must sustain themselves as instruments for other people's property (whose growth is naturally of some concern to the state.)
Even if the state is still active as a welfare state, this is not to cancel its own activities again. It eliminates not poverty, but ensure by a redistribution of poverty that no harm comes to the state and capital.