A United Nations report says that the last 15 years have seen a
tremendous growth in wealth for some side by side with an
"unprecedented decline" for others.
In the top 15 industrialized countries, there has been a dramatic
surge in economic growth since 1980, according to the UN's Human
Development Report 1996.
"Over much of this period, however, economic decline or stagnation has
affected 100 countries, reducing the incomes of 1.6 billion people,"
the report says.
"In 70 of these countries average incomes are less than they were in
1980--and in 43 countries less than they were in 1970. Over 1990-93
alone, average incomes fell by a fifth or more in 21 countries." This
last drop was mostly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The UN study finds that "the world has become more polarized, and the
gulf between the poor and rich of the world has widened even further."
Some facts the UN study finds are:
* The poorest 20 percent of the world's people saw their share of
global income decline from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent in the past
30 years.
* The assets of the world's 358 billionaires exceed the combined
annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people.
* During the last 30 years, the proportion of people with negative
per-capita income growth tripled.
* In the 1980s, the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union did much better economically than all but a handful
of countries. But after the return of capitalist exploitation,
these countries "suffered steep declines in per capita
income-which fell on average by a third from the peaks in the
mid-1980s."
The report's stark picture is a virtual condemnation of capitalism.
Though that is not its authors' conclusion.
The report offers many suggestions on what could be changed in order
to eliminate what is called the "rich-poor gap." But it does not say
how these suggestions might be instituted. That's because it can't.
Because the report fails to clearly indicate that capitalism is the
source of the problem, it cannot offer the only possible solution: the
elimination of capitalism.
Karl Marx, in his classic study of the workings of capitalism, showed
that the conditions of capitalist production can produce great wealth
only by also creating grinding poverty. He said, in fact, that this is
an "absolute general law" of capitalism. (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 644)
Marx was not saying, as some argued at the time, that capitalism would
force the real wages of the workers to decline more and more. This has
not happened, though even the highest-paid workers are vastly poorer
than the wealthy ruling class.
The law of capitalism Marx found is that there is an absolute
impoverishment of a section of the working class that the capitalist
system throws out of the production process: the chronically
unemployed, the elderly, disabled persons, etc. These are the
permanent poor who have no chance of coming out of poverty.
This poverty pulls down the living standards of the entire working
class. The permanent poor serve as a reserve labor force-workers who
are forced to accept any wage, no matter how low, in order to escape
this grinding poverty. This pressure is used to drive down wages for
all workers.
Capitalism has never been able to eliminate poverty. It has not
eliminated poverty either in the United States or around the world.
Capitalism not only creates a permanent layer of poor people, but
there is also the periodical impoverishment of workers hit by
corporate downsizing, layoffs, cutbacks, and wage reductions.
Capitalism's failure to eliminate poverty is proof of its bankruptcy.
It is an outdated economic system.
Revolutionary socialism remains the best answer.
Workers World, August 1996
Shawgi Tell
University at Buffalo
Graduate School of Education
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
