Class Analysis of Poverty

MOST SOCIALISTS, especially Marxists, have long maintained that one cannot properly understand, nor can one adequately address, poverty without linking it to deeper issues of class and exploitation underlying capitalist social relations. Class analysis recognizes that within capitalist societies the vast majority of people are separated from the means of producing their basic subsistence, including food, clothing, housing, and other necessities.

This majority, the working class, must survive by selling its capacity to work to those capitalists who own and control productive resources and is therefore in a precarious socioeconomic position. Thus, the material conditions enjoyed by a minority in capitalist societies are directly related to the material exclusion of the majority. Poverty is socially produced rather than resulting from characteristics of the individual.

From the perspective of class analysis, poverty is an inherent and regular feature of capitalist social relations rather than an unfortunate exception or by-product of some specific feature of capitalism, such as the unequal distribution of income or competition.

Instead poverty is understood as an integral, indeed central, feature of class exploitation within capitalist societies. Poverty, rather than an accidental outcome of specific economic policies or periods within trade cycles, is a necessary condition for capitalist productive relations and the accumulation of profit.

While more common in other parts of the world, class analyses of poverty are the least prominent approach taken by social scientists and analysts of poverty in North America. The most prominent perspectives on poverty within social sciences in North America explain poverty as resulting from opportunity structures faced by poor people.

In this view, deindustrialization, the decline of manufacturing and loss of decent-paying unskilled or semiskilled jobs, generally related to economic globalization, has broadened and deepened experiences of poverty in the industrialized north. Poverty is thus regarded as an outcome of shifts in the economy from Fordism to post-Fordism or from the welfare state to the workfare state through neoliberalism.

For advocates of this approach the solution to poverty is through a return to policies and programs featured within previous welfare state regimes. Emphasis is often placed on training programs geared toward providing people with the skills necessary to compete more successfully in the labor market. Other proposed [Page 174]solutions include the expansion of public works to provide job opportunities for people with limited skills. In either case, however, these proposals can be complementary with workfare schemes.

The underlying assumption is that poverty can be solved if powerful actors, such as corporations or the state, are convinced of the effectiveness of certain social programs to alleviate poverty, and consent to fund such programs. Nowhere is there a sense that powerful groups in society have a direct interest in the continuation of poverty.

From the perspective of a class analysis of poverty, reducing poverty actually requires confrontation with, and the eventual defeat of, powerful social groups, most notably those who own and control capital. These groups cannot be converted to the cause of real poverty eradication because their social position is based on the ongoing existence of poverty. Indeed, for powerful elites, that is, members of the capitalist class, the eradication of poverty would undermine the social basis for their position as a privileged class within capitalism.

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