On Subsistance and Poverty

Getting away from the atheist theme of this blog for the last week or so and back to the economic and political issues, this is a follow up to a previous article called “hunger, poverty, and population growth among digital bugs and humans.” In the original post I looked at the relationship between wealth and population growth and ended up at the conclusion that unrestricted population growth creates scarcity within any closed system, and that in human terms that means we cannot afford to continue the rapid population growth of the 20th century since – even assuming that we are able to successfully move to a post-capitalist economy – unrestricted population growth would still result in poverty.

Commentors on the blog left a couple of interesting responses – first that we should question the assumption that subsistence is poverty and second that the entire notion of scarcity as a fundamental fact of life is part and parcel of the capitalist worldview. I’m going to deal with the first of those two questions in this post and leave the second for another post later this week.

I guess the first thing to do is define “poverty”. To me there are two separate but related definitions of the term – one referring to actual physical tangible wealth and the other referring to what is sometimes called “social capital.” In real terms I would argue that social capital is by far the more valuable of the two and that most exchanges of tangible physical wealth have the pursuit of social capital as their goal. In a capitalist society social capital is gained through conspicuous consumption and showing off monetary wealth – we venerate the rich and despise the poor simply because they are rich and poor, not because of what they contribute to our society. So it is that Paris Hilton is a celebrity while homeless veterans freeze to death in our streets.

This is at the core of the capitalist ethos – we are social animals and people crave the approval and respect of their peers, something that is glaringly obvious when one looks at the marketing of luxury goods. People don’t drop 8 million dollars on a car because they believe it’s actually worth the money, they do it to show off the fact that they can. Similarly, corporate rappers don’t go on and on about their gold chains and mansions (which they usually don’t even actually own) because of any intrinsic value in those things, they do it because being able to consume vast amounts of wealth is seen as a sign of success as a human being in a hierarchal society. In egalitarian societies, on the other hand, the exchange between social capital and consumption flows in the other direction – people gain status in their communities by giving wealth away, not consuming it; the classic example being the potlatch ceremony as practiced by some indigenous north americans.

To a certain degree, of course, both types of exchange exist in both societies – rich people who give away their money clearly expect public recognition and accolades as a reward for doing so and it takes a certain level of wealth, even in a relatively egalitarian indigenous society – to be able to host a potlatch and give things away. The issue is which form of exchange predominates in each society, and it should be pretty obvious that in our society wealth = power and prestige. So in social terms “poverty” can be defined as a lack of respect and admiration from ones peers.

In economic terms the definition of poverty is a bit different. Simply put, for a person in a society with an unequal distribution of wealth, if you have less wealth then your neighbors you are more likely to think of yourself as poor then someone who lives in an egalitarian society; even if in absolute terms the person in the egalitarian society is living at a much “lower” standard of living. It’s called Relative Deprivation, and in real terms it means that no matter how much total wealth any given group or society has, if there is an unequal distribution of that wealth those on the lower end of the distribution scale become “poor”. Further, since in capitalist societies social capital and physical capital are essentially synonymous (wealth = power and respect), people who are perceived as poor based on their inability to consume as much as their neighbors actually become “poor” in social terms as well.

So I guess the short answer would be no – subsistence doesn’t = poverty in a society where everyone is living at the level of subsistence. Thing is, that’s not the society we’re living in. In our global economy nearly 3 billion people – about half the world’s population – lives on less then two dollars a day while an incredibly tiny super-elite of only a few hundred individuals controls the majority of the planets wealth. The industrial revolution presented humanity with an incredible opportunity to virtually eliminate scarcity and improve the standards of living for all humankind. Instead we’ve chosen to leave the vast majority of the world’s population at or below subsistence while giving an incredibly tiny minority truly unprecedented and obscene amounts of wealth. And that, frankly, is a crime. It’s a crime against humanity and a crime against our very nature as social beings.

When Peter Kropotkin published The Conquest of Bread in 1906 he laid this same dilemma out in no uncertain terms – as a species we are very clever and we have incredible capacity to create wealth. The question is whether we, as a species, will choose to focus that creative energy on creating ever expanding wealth for a ruling elite while the rest of us – the vast majority – sell our lives in order to get just enough wealth to keep living; or whether we will instead adopt a more egalitarian economy that provides everyone a more modest but more sustainable standard of living and the opportunity to lead full and fulfilling lives.

I would argue that by failing to seize the opportunities that Kropotkin pointed out and instead continue plundering the planet and each other for the benefit of the few, we have failed ourselves and countless generations to come. Instead of seizing the opportunities of industrialization our species chose to use it to make war on each other. Instead of planning ahead and working together to lift each other up we have squandered away our planets natural wealth in the pursuit of short-term extravagance for the few. The horrendous ecological destruction we have wrought in the last century will take centuries to reverse – if indeed it’s reversible at all. And that is the greatest irony of this whole sad mess: capitalism’s endless pursuit of wealth has made us, our children, and our children’s children for uncounted generations into the future measurably poorer.

Posted: December 3rd, 2007 under economics.
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