Ending Poverty (Second of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

Inequality masking the true face of inequity

The definition of poverty, as an income on or below which a family can no longer meet the bare minimum requirements to exist, presents a complementary realization: the capitalist system may actually have no solution to it. This is because the iron law of wages that governs the principal economic relationship of classes in society tends to keep income at the lower strata to the lowest.

The case is mostly true to countries in the southern hemisphere which have been kept perennially underdeveloped by colonial exploitation. While rich economies, like those of the United States and Europe, pay workers ten or more times the wages of their counterparts in the global south, they are able to do so only because of the sacrifice of the intensely exploited peasant and working classes here.

The global sway of the highly advanced capitalist societies, especially in the west, would stunt growth and keep incomes of billions of people marginalized under the pre-industrial, debt-ridden and underproductive economies that they foist on these societies and dominate.

In most times, the minimum wage here never rises above the poverty level. Yet, this is only for firms that care to observe the minimum wage law, as the case in the Philippines is. A majority of companies consisting mostly of small-scale manufacturing and commercial outfits pays workers even way below the mandated wage.

What does the historical reality show? Indeed, poverty is a condition fostered by the prevailing social and economic system. It is due to an order that denies the working masses the power to decide what’s good for them. It owes to the predatory regimes of labor imposed by the economically dominant classes of society.

Earnings will always be unequal, apologists of the system defend. It is inevitable, because people themselves by nature are unequal. The rich folks naturally get rewarded for extraordinary talent, diligence, hard work, and acumen. So, they earn more money than the average rest.

The argument however falls short of explaining why some of them garner inordinately more money in this life than the majority of the masses could ever earn in several lifetimes.  

The highest level of excellence or the hardest humanly possible labor still cannot account for some folks getting into the club of the richest – the one percent who owns more than half of the globe’s wealth, while most of everyone else wallows in penury they starve at certain times of the year.

The justification for so much wealth at the other pool actually does not stop at extolling the virtues of its appropriators. Apologists go further to blaming the poor themselves for being poor. They blame them for being inept, lazy, vice-prone, and not doing any better. “That, gentlemen, is why the unfortunate assholes never earn more than they pee,” they would opine.

All men are created equal, they admit. But the problem with being poor is in the poor themselves. They cannot hope to be rewarded with equality, for not being equal to the economic challenge, for not doing more to earn more, and seeking to be the best to best the competition. Instead, they are prone to staying just what they are, not improving, uncommitted and indolent.

So, the fact that folks are just not equal in talent, intellect and effort is the reason why one class of people is extremely wealthy, and another extremely poor. Is that truly the case?

To the peasants in the granaries of Luzon whose life since they grew taller than the grass has never left the back-breaking toil on the land, to the sacadas in the sugar haciendas of Negros whose interminable and agonizing labor on the vast farms still is not enough to ease the pain of failing to give a family a decent life, and to the work slaves in factories and sweatshops, the said fact doesn’t hold water. They know who are the lazybones.

But who says anyway that inequality is the problem? It is not. The problem is the evil wherein the poor do not get what they earn, while their slave masters get what they don’t earn. And the latter simply get it from them who actually earned what was unfairly cut. That is not inequality. That is inequity.

The poor did not become poor, because they are lazy and inept, or don’t know better. They are so, because they are exploited and denied enjoyment of the wealth they create by labor. They are paid in fixed wages that is not enough to live on, but by law is enough to own their labor power. Then their labor is spent to create wealth that they never get to hold. Such appropriated wealth would later be used against them as a kind of power to squeeze them tighter.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of their exploiters makes them forever poor. Because of the circumstance, they can only live if they work, but they can only work if their work brings profit to the appropriators of wealth. Such a rule of capitalist society bonds them to low-wage labor. 

What does the system tell? Raking wealth by a tiny few at the expense of the multitude is not just pure and simple inequality. It is inequity. It is injustice.

Still, many poor are poor because they cannot even work at all. They are irregularly employed or perennially unemployed. They are not absorbed by industry, do not enter into wage-work relationships, and therefore stay with the ranks of the vast industrial reserve army. Their idle state is used to keep wages down by keeping labor supply up and labor competition high.

Wage-labor propelled industrial production. Industrial production and, in its wake, the accumulation of wealth never hitherto witnessed brought unprecedented social progress. But at the back of progress, the concentration of gigantic wealth in a few would be the source of hardships of billions. It is this basic social condition that would perpetuate the cycle of poverty from generation to generation.

Intergenerational poverty is the product and manifestation of the victimization of man by man, one class by another. 

Accounts in every clime tell that the poor are the kind of hard-working folks that society cannot do without: farmers, wage-earners, and work-slaves in sweatshops and plantations. They continue to be poor, not because they are laggards and prone to sloth, but because the regime of production designed to amass wealth by a few deny them of advancement, much less of earning sufficiently. 

They are denied from getting the just fruits of their labor. The injustice strangulates the chances of their redemption from want, economic advancement, and social empowerment.