CNS: House Organ, March 2001

Poverty is on the increase worldwide, not only relatively but also in absolute terms, for the poorer one-half of human kind. The question is why? After all, given the worldUs productive forces, its aggregated wealth and store of scientific and technological and administrative and other knowledge, certain parameters of poverty could be sharply decreased in a few years and eliminated altogether in a few decades. What are these parameters? Certainly health, nutrition, sanitation, education, and shelter Q each of which is related to the others in various ways: bad nutrition results in bad health conditions, as does bad sanitation and housing and education. It is hard to build good housing in a district in which sanitation is not good. Education loses much of its meaning when there are not books and few teachers to teach the books, and when children are sick and hungry.

Every country in the world in the not-too-distant future could enjoy a health system as good as CubaUs, an educational system as good as FranceUs, sanitation and shelter substantial enough to satisfy the most demanding socially conscious architects and builders, and nutrition of a quality that one finds today in the typical health club. Let us call these desirable parameters the Good Five (noting that we can add Renviron- mental rationality and sensibilityS and RneighborlinessS and other Goods without too much extra trouble).

The problem is that neoliberalism is silent about this kind of planning and doing. More World Bank talk about Rtargeting povertyS has overtones of a rifle range, not a serious effort to address the Good Five. Neoliberalism today is in fact tightening the downward spiral of global well-being, increasing poverty (and other things such as insecurity, fear, hopelessness). In a recent House Organ, Jim OUConnor said that no one favors poverty, yet poverty grows worse as the years go by on the neoliberal calendar, and he asked, Rwhy?S All sorts of explanations can and have been put forward to explain the increase in poverty, but there is one explanation that has been greatly neglected, namely, that increasing poverty today is functional for the whole neoliberal edifice, that without growing poverty the operations of neoliberalism would be more difficult to manage.

If work were to be evenly distributed among those in need of it, both unemployment and overwork could disappear in a short time. More, the provision of the Good Five requires relatively little capital and only reasonable amounts of human labor. It is technically possible to produce any given level of output (or GDP) with full employment and absence of overwork. Unfortunately, it is not economically or political feasible to do so. Neoliberal capitalism needs all the wage labor it can get to reduce self-provisioning and to orient the satisfaction of needs to the market for consumer goods, so that a maximum amount of surplus capital can be realized. Further, neoliberal capitalism requires that one part of the wage labor force be underemployed or out-of-work in order to maximize production by those lucky enough to obtain steady work. The carrot is the wage, the stick is the reserve army of labor. Neoliberal capitalism overworks one part of the working class such that its victims are too exhausted to complain and organize to improve their condition, as well as being in constant fear of losing their jobs. At the other end of the spectrum of labor, unemployment, underemployment, and subemployment (employment at less than a living wage) make workers desperate for work, easy victims of political clientelism and other forms of manipulation. With employment and unemployment, the unemployed worker disciplines the employed worker; with a sharing of employment and leisure more or less equally, the discipline of the wage system is lost. Without a handy stick, capital would have to supply more carrots, each extra carrot coming out of its harvest of surplus value or profits.

The polarization between the employed and unemployed, the waged and the unwaged, the worker getting by and the poor, has other useful byproducts. The unemployed sometimes resort to violence, usually of a random kind, but principally channeled horizontally. Worker against worker. Old immigrant against new immigrant. Light brown against black. This kind of violence, seemingly senseless, but explicable in terms of Fanon-type theory, sells newspapers, commercial time on the TV (a welcome alternative to sports events), and RjustifiesS more police and security forces generally. In most countries in which Structural Adjustment Policies preclude increases in the workforce in the public sector (a no-no in the neoliberal discourse), exceptions are made for expanded security forces, jails and prisons, even paramilitary squads not- so-secretly funded by the government or factions within the government. The spectacle of the poor fighting one another and not the agents of their misery surely bring smiles to the faces of the more sophisticated bosses of the Bretton Woods institutions.

The internal legitimacy of governments in the grip of increased poverty is partly provided by armies of political operatives at the local level, mostly but not exclusively serving the incumbent political party, which with respect to its attitude toward neoliberalism is indistinguish- able from the opposition party. These operatives control access to scarce resources on the part of the poor Q mostly free food and household goods and access to social services. The gatekeeper or guard labor of these operatives is enhanced in proportion to the scarcity of the goods they control and dole out. It follows, I think, that greater abundance of Good Five resources would have the effect of devaluing this clientelist structure and thus weaken the political legitimacy of the system that relies on it.

Middle-class intellectuals have to be taken care of by neoliberalism, as they are a notoriously dissatisfied and quarrelsome lot, who may sometimes ask embarrassing questions about the neoliberal agenda and its terrible effects. So they have to be provided with jobs and to be made to feel important. Given that the level of poverty is so great, a special kind of apparatus must be set up to fight the system that produces the poverty, and it is convenient to design this structure such that it is Rmiddle-class-intellectual-manpower-intensive.S New plans to Rtarget povertyS focused on this or that aspect of poverty are made. The great bourgeois revolutions of long ago introduced the concept of RcitizenshipS and RentitlementS and through these universal access to certain rights and social benefits. The approach of the Bretton Woods crowd is subtly different. As poverty is revealed and publicized, a myriad of focused programs appear, each targeting a particular group of unfortunates. International lending finance most of these programs, which increases the recipient countriesU foreign debt in the long-run and the depth and harshness of the SAPs in the short-run. These programs call for an inflated body of social analysts, methodologists, specialists, technicians and consultants, a veritable structure of Rgood intentionsS superimposed on the country and its poor. Well-paid employment for many intellectuals almost ensures that these new operatives are both relieved that they are making easy money during hard times and also afraid of proposing ideas which are at variance with the received wisdom.

Universal social programs based on the concept of citizenship would do away with this crazy quilt approach, being more efficient in the use of scarce resources. But who needs or wants efficiency when it is a question of pacifying intellectuals in a time of precarious legitimacy, when the poor have to be put down and controlled and also when circulating foreign loans arising from the overproduction or surplus of capital have to be repaid?

The basic problem of neoliberalism (or capitalism free from the control of civil society) is simply this: LetUs say that a half-serious effort to reduce poverty were to be proposed by a government or one of its branches. Immediately there would occur a reallocation of power. Forces opposed to this effort would appear to prevent any authentic anti-poverty policy Q forces which understand that poverty is functional for neoliberal capitalism.

Thus let the poor be with us, to claim a place in the kingdom beyond if not the village or block here and now. They might not know it but that have an important role to play in the grand strategy of neoliberalism and global capital. - Jose Carlos Escurdero

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS)
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