Poverty Reduced Despite Depression

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/17/aid-trade-reduce-acute-poverty
Naturally, the folks on reddit have been claimingvthat this means that capitalism is wonderful. So how do we argue against this logic?

My answer would simply be that capitalism is not a global mode of production, or that in many areas there is still a semi-feudal mode of production. So in these areas it isn't fair to say that capitalism is giving them a better lot because many of these areas haven't been capitalist before. So in these Semi-Feudal areas capitalism is still to an extend an (economically) progressive force and therefore naturally reduces poverty because the poverty of these areas isn't the poverty of capitalism but the poverty of feudalism, which no one denies is shittier than capitalism. On the other hand when we look at the centers of capitalism we see that in these areas where capitalism has matured poverty is increasing significantly during areas of economic downturn and upturn consistantly for the last half of a century, and this increase in poverty is because while the exploitation of the periphery nations was a counteracting force that prevented the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Decline, now that the periphery is being incorperated into the capitalist mode of production, it no longer serves this purpose and once there is only one mode of production left the tendency for the rate of profit will bear down on us with full force and the poverty we have seen in the first world will increase more rapidly and the progressive nature of capitalism in the third world will cease entirely and they will join the stagnation of the centers of capitalism.

So, any thoughts?

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Every time there's some "poverty is decreasing" reports it's due to some increase in overall income compared to some absurd flat rate of "total deprivation" defined at 1 or 2 dollars to live on a day... even if this is entirely due to inflation.

[Skyhilist]

That poverty is decreasing right now is irrelevant, because things like poverty tend to rise and fall under capitalism and it will obviously never reach zero. Any amount of impoverished people whose importance in society being ignored due to capitalism is too much.

[Paul Pott]

Of course poverty falls when people move from the absolutely destitute rural parts of a country (like India) to the slums of a major city.

I'm pretending this isn't entirely an increase in total wealth, which is going to the richest more than ever. In fact the number of billionaires in China, Russia, and India is absolutely exploding.

[cyu]

It just depends on how articles like this are worded.

If the tone is "everything is getting better, so you should stop protesting" - it is actually a sign that those in power are afraid they are about to be overthrown.

[Zealot]

It just depends on how articles like this are worded.

If the tone is "everything is getting better, so you should stop protesting" - it is actually a sign that those in power are afraid they are about to be overthrown.

Reminds me of this (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2291288/Welfare-minister-rages-bishops-Theres-moral-trapping-people-benefits-says-Iain-Duncan-Smith.html?ICO=most_read_module)article by the Daily Mail which says:

"The Left-leaning Children’s Society charity – which is allied to the Church of England – came up with the figure of 200,000 children who would be pushed into poverty by the welfare cap. However, such predictions are fraught with difficulties. The arbitrary nature of the current poverty measure – anything below 60 per cent of median earnings – means that the recession actually helped lift 300,000 children out of poverty without any meaningful change in their circumstances. It happened simply because average incomes fell... It is hard to disagree with Mr Duncan Smith’s central contention that the best way to help children out of poverty is not by giving their parents an extra pound a week to push them over an arbitrary line – but through work."

So, because the average income in Britain has declined, 300,000 children have been lifted out of poverty and therefore any attempt to estimate how many children will be thrown into poverty by spending cuts is "fraught with difficulties" :lol:

[Jimmie Higgins]

Of course poverty falls when people move from the absolutely destitute rural parts of a country (like India) to the slums of a major city.

Yeah if I were to guess, this is what's reflected in the data. Many of the countries they named are places where there has been both an increase in international capital investment (either to extract resources or to take advantage of low wages for manufacturing), restructuring of agriculture due to cheap imports from bigger economies and increased agribusiness (leading to debt and driving smaller and subsitance farmers more into the labor market) and a connected migration to the cities in search for wages.

[Raúl Duke]

I never really find these "world comparisons" to be relevant to the "wonders" of capitalism.

You do have a point in that one can argue that capitalism in the least developed areas is more "progressive" or more inclined towards progress than in the "developed world."

But if we look across the developed world, capitalism has instead proven itself a bar to people's living standards recently (i.e. austerity) and in the future even those developed areas may face the same issue.

[Paul Pott]

Let me post what I think are the two most important parts of this article:


The brighter global picture is the result of international and national aid and development projects investing in schools, health clinics, housing, infrastructure and improved access to water. The UN also pointed to trade as being a key factor which was improving conditions in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. These improvements have not been picked up in the past when poverty has been measured strictly in income terms without taking into account other factors – health, education and living standards."International and national aid and development projects" refers mostly to the humanitarian industry, which is one of capitalism's insurance policies against instability. We aren't looking at how much money these people have now, but the number of schools, wells, etc. built by foreign NGOs. Note that there are fewer and fewer people to serve in this way. They're moving in droves to find work in the cities, where those sort of things are easier to come by. The peasantry is shrinking.

That is nothing but a patch on poverty. It's questionable that anything whatsoever has improved in Afghanistan besides the number of schools on paper.


The initiative hopes insights from the MPI will incentivise international donors and governments to help the poorest by allowing the results to be measured. The academics believe old methods of looking at income levels – such as those living on $1.25 a day or less – ignores other deprivations in, for example, nutrition, health and sanitation.
The system was developed in 2010 by the institute's director, Dr Sabina Alkire, and Dr Maria Emma Santos. Dr Alkire said: "As poor people worldwide have said, poverty is more than money – it is ill health, it is food insecurity, it is not having work, or experiencing violence and humiliation, or not having health care, electricity, or good housing.
"Citizen activism is under-appreciated for its role. Maybe we have been overlooking the power of the people themselves, women who are empowering each other, civil society pulling itself up."
In other words, the old ways of measuring poverty didn't reflect the glory of global neoliberalism in the way that the stock markets have. So we invent a new one.

Then we look at real improvements from labor struggle, civil rights movements for marginalized groups, and the coming of age of third world social democracy, such as in Latin America, and in effect attribute it to neoliberalism, which to be honest is fair for the last one.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Capitalism has been and still is, to some extent, a great vehicle for reducing poverty and raising living standards, on average and in absolute terms. However, a common trend under capitalism is that a reduction in poverty comes with a rise in income inequality.

For a classic case of this, see China from the 1970s to present day.

[cyu]

From http://cjyu.wordpress.com/article/the-best-place-to-live-gcybcajus7dp-32/ - I would argue that it's not so much capitalism that has improved people's lives over the 20th century (as capitalist-owned media would have you believe), but that it was nations with strong (ie. the most "real") democracies that most improved people's lives in the 20th century.

[Paul Pott]

China was an example of a stale economy with massive untapped potential of cheap labor and resources brought to life by an infusion of western capital, technology, expertise, trade, and credit. This made it necessary to train a large number of educated professionals, and made it possible for a strong petit-bourgeoisie to form, hence the new Chinese middle class you so often hear about. In recent years the working class in the major industrial centers has become very militant, extracting concessions and bettering its own conditions. This has prompted western capital to look elsewhere for cheaper labor, and to invest more heavily in technology to eliminate some labor.

The downside is that capitalism in China depends wholly on the subsidy economies of the west. Once the financial system tanks and those dry up, the legacy of the past 30 years will be little more than modernized cities.

[subcp]

The inclusion of credit as part of the total wage, changing standards of what is poverty, what is the optimum (normal) rate of unemployment, a number of factors are at work. The article is fluff; rates of poverty is a subjective standard (as explained by Red Godfathers post- how the same data can be used to argue poverty levels are going massively down or massively up).

Capitalism is a world system and has been since at the latest the turn of the 20th century (1900). The changes in the periphery since the 1920's, where many areas have industrialized, and changes since the 1960's-1980's where regions of the periphery have become zones of hyper-exploitation and serve as 'workshop nations' that manufacture commodities for the rest of the world, demonstrates integration since the time when this relationship was in reverse.

Things are shit everywhere, to different degrees- I don't think it has anything to do with 'super-profits' supposedly alleviating the crisis in central countries.