Critical

Social Policy
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Rethinking poverty
Tony Novak
Critical Social Policy 1995 15: 58
DOI: 10.1177/026101839501504404
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http://csp.sagepub.com/content/15/44-45/58

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Rethinking poverty
TONY NOVAK

Abstract

For the past hundred years thinking about poverty has been stuck
within an empiricist framework that has concentrated on the measurement ofpoverty to the neglect of theory and explanation. This has had
very limiting effects on the way that both poverty and the poor have
been understood. It is time to re-think how poverty is looked at and
analysed in order to locate it within its proper political perspective, not
only to arrive at more meaningful measurement but also to help de-

velop a strategy to overcome it.

As Karl Polanyi observes in his classic work, The Great Transformation, The wage system imperatively demanded the withdrawal of &dquo;the
right to live&dquo; as proclaimed in earlier legislation. Nothing could have
been more patent than the mutual incompatibility of institutions like
the wage system and &dquo;the right to live&dquo;. The latter therefore had to go,
in the interests of all (Noam Chomsky, Foreword to Albert 1994: ix).
For the past hundred years western social science, typified in the
dominant British tradition of social administration, has viewed and
understood poverty from within the prism of a cramped and atheoretical empiricism. Apeing the world of the natural sciences, this empiricism establishes the accumulation of facts, and in particular the
measurement of supposedly scientific data as the foundation of theoretical understanding.
In a tradition extending back to the late 19th-century work of Booth
and Rowntree this empiricism has encouraged a particularly narrow
conception of poverty. In it the poor are portrayed not only as an
isolated minority, but also as a group whose position and experience is
distinct and separate from the rest of the population. The poor are a
class apart. It has further tended to focus almost exclusively on quantifiable levels of income - on the measurement of poverty - to the neglect
of its wider dimensions of insecurity and oppression, the nuances of
gender and race, powerlessness and struggle. It has also led to interminable and ultimately fruitless argument and confusion as to how
poverty should be defined and measured, and despite decades of work
still fails adequately to take account of the international dynamics of

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poverty and the comparison of poverty in rich and poor countries alike.
Above all, and

underlying these limitations, it has failed to produce an

adequate theory of poverty and its causes.
Most existing studies of poverty make the mistake of beginning
where they should end up. Instead of beginning with an understanding
of the nature and causes of poverty, from which adequate and appropriate measurements can be drawn, they begin by trying to quantify
poverty. The result is that the

measurement itself becomes a substitute

for definition: to be poor is to have less than a certain level of income.
The poverty line, wherever it is drawn, thus defines what is poverty and
who is poor, and all that is left is an endless argument as to where the
line should be drawn. As a consequence our understanding and definition of poverty becomes arbitrary, partial and inadequate. This concentration on achieving an operational definition of poverty - a definition that can immediately be used to measure and quantify poverty to the neglect of an analytical definition is the greatest hall-mark, and
limitation, of most literature on the subject.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE POVERTY LINE

Few commentators now seriously adhere to a rigorous interpretation of
absolute poverty - at least in the traditional sense of positing a fixed,
unchangeable standard that is applicable to all societies over all time (2)
The sheer impossibility of establishing even absolute minimum standards of nutrition necessary for simple physical survival, when survival
itself depends upon such relative variables as life expectancy and standards of health, to say nothing of social conventions, means that all
measures of poverty are inevitably relative. The achievements of researchers such as Abel-Smith and Townsend from the 1960s onwards in
discrediting notions of absolute poverty and establishing poverty as a
relative phenomenon, although crucially important in terms of widening peoples understanding and appreciation of the extent of poverty,
remained nevertheless something of a Pyrrhic victory. This rediscovery
of poverty only established (as they themselves pointed out) what
economists such as Adam Smith had argued two hundred years earlier.
Moreover, it failed to shift the empiricist paradigm within which
poverty was viewed, and as a result left the stud of poverty stuck in a
morass of competing, and subjective,
By taking a poverty line as the starting point for the operational
definition of poverty, the definition itself becomes arbitrary and open
to dispute. For many governments, for example, the definition of
poverty is often the lowest level of income which it is possible politically
to get away with. Elsewhere it depends upon the views of so-called

definitions 3).

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to determine what is the minimum standard of diet and other

essentials. However well-intentioned such efforts might be, the result
is inevitably subjective and arbitrary. In Britain, where the absence of
an official poverty line has led to the use of minimal state benefit levels
as a proxy for measuring poverty, the absurdity becomes even more
pronounced, for government has only to reduce the value of benefits to
reduce poverty at a stroke. Arbitrariness is an inevitable part of the
definition: I say poverty is x, and you say it is y, and without a theory
of poverty we will never agree.
Relative poverty tells us that poverty is relative - as it always has
been - to the living standards of the rest of the population, but it fails to
establish the nature of this relationship, and therefore how it should
properly be measured. Consequently many theories of relative
poverty are not theories at all, but descriptions. Lacking an analysis of
poverty, they search for a measure to define it, but end up in a circular
argument whereby the detailing of the living standards of the poor
simply describe the often arbitrary poverty line that is taken to define
poverty in the first place.
Many attempts to develop sympathetic and sensitive definitions of
poverty equally fail to resolve the problem. Mack and Lansley (1985) in
their study of Poor Britain sought to establish a standard based upon a
sampling of the general population as to their perceptions of what
people considered to be the minimum requirements for life in contemporary society. While an important and useful challenge to the
minimalistic definitions based on subsistence or state benefit levels,
such definitions remain essentially subjective. Whether or not the
general population considers that a certain standard of living equates
with poverty can tell us a lot about perceptions of poverty. But, and
especially in a context where poverty is stigmatised and where few
people would wish to identify themselves as poor, it does not tell us
what poverty is, or provide an independent and objective yardstick by
which to measure it.
Equally Peter Townsend in his search for scientific criteria and
objective social observation (Townsend, 1985) fails to escape the
empiricist trap. His definition is based on the view that there is a
measurable level of income below which people are unable to participate in the diets, amenities, standards, services and activities which are
common or customary in society. If they lack or are denied resources to
obtain access to these conditions of life and so fulfil membership of
society they are in poverty (Townsend, 1979, p915). His argument for
a wider consideration of human need - to move beyond minimal considerations of food, clothing and shelter to include such factors as
working and environmental conditions and participation in social life -

experts

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closer than most studies to what it means to be poor. But in the

absence of an analytical definition of poverty it does so simply by
enlarging the description: by giving an ever fuller account of what
poverty is like as a way of defining what poverty is. Thus his major
study of Poverty in the United Kingdom identifies 60 different indicators
of poverty, and even then suggests that these are provisional and by no
means exhaustive.
Moreover, the problem still remains of who is to determine these
indicators and on what basis: to argue that poverty is relative should
not be to argue that poverty is subjective. Yet who is to say that at least
one day in the last fortnight with insufficient to eat (Townsend, 1987,
p141) is a more objective or adequate indicator of poverty than insufficient to eat in the last week or even every day? Townsend further
suggests that a different set of indicators may be required not only for
studying poverty in different countries, but also for identifying poverty
amongst diverse groups within the same country whose cultural expectations and standards differ: If needs are relative to society, then they
are also relative to the set of social sub-systems to which the individual
comes

belongs (Townsend, 1979, p53).

The danger is not only that of submerging research beneath a potentially infinite mountain of variables requiring investigation as the definition of poverty is expanded to take account of the myriad of items
and opportunities that poor people lack. It also encourages a relativism
that fragments and requires different criteria and definitions of poverty
for the different social or cultural groups within the population.
The failure of social science to address itself seriously to a theory and
explanation of poverty - Townsends major study, for example,
running to over 900 pages, devotes only six pages to Explanations of
Poverty - has left it preoccupied with operational definitions that concentrate on its measurement and quantification. The problems inherent
in this approach have created a situation where competing measurements - substituting for definitions - are put forward in an endless and
largely futile argument about whose particular measurement is to
count. One important consequence of this is a tendency to fall back on
the lowest and most meagre measure that will receive general support.
It is almost as if, having established the relative nature of poverty,
research is keen to return to the most minimal relative definition possible as a way of defending it. There is almost an embarrassment about
being seen to be too generous, and whether through fear of ridicule and
criticism or through lack of a theoretical strength to justify a bolder
stand, we fall back into an acceptance of a miserly level of income that
confines the poor to a minority (though still alarmingly large) part of
the population. In countries like Britain this tendency is exacerbated by

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(as we shall see the often misleading) images of poverty in the third
world: faced with such extreme want as is projected in the media of
starvation and malnutrition, few people will defend the lack of a television or a washing machine as a sign of poverty. Thus poverty in the
third world comes to be seen as real poverty, while the (relative)
poverty in rich countries somehow is not. So long as we continue to
think of poverty first and foremost in terms of quantifiable incomes and
standards of living, this tendency will continue to haunt us. We have to
rethink how we think about poverty.
A second consequence of this empiricist approach is that the whole
project of defining poverty runs the danger of being discredited and
belittled. Third world poverty has often been used in this way, to
discredit claims of widespread poverty in the west, and at the empirical
level the evidence is powerful (though not, as we shall see, quite so
clear-cut). But the arbitrary, and sometimes conflicting, measurements
that are put forward to define poverty have also been used to discredit
research within a particular country. Politicians, especially of the
Right, have not been slow to take advantage of this situation. Thus in
1985 the Conservative government in Britain, having discussed the
range of research and in particular the numerous different definitions
and measurements of poverty put forward by social scientists over the
previous 30 years, came to the conclusion that there is now no universally agreed standard of poverty (Green Paper, 1985, p12), and proceeded to enact legislation that severely reduced the income of the
poorest.
The limitations of defining poverty by reference to a poverty line do
stop there however. Such a conception inevitably obscures the
experience of poverty as a continuum, as if to have 1 a week more
than the poverty line means a qualitative difference between being
poor and not being poor. Given the prevailing distribution of income,
there is a significantly greater number of people just above any existing
poverty line whose experience and living standards are little different
from those on or just below the line, yet who are excluded from consideration.
Inevitable also is the tendency not only to measure but also to understand poverty purely in terms of income. Money is of course crucial in
understanding poverty, but poverty is also much more thanjust a lack
of money. It is about insecurity and powerlessness: about not knowing
how youre going to get through to the end of the week, about having
no or little control over your future, few choices, no chances to plan
ahead, no prospect or hope of escape from an interminable struggle
simply to survive. It is to be faced by a world which constantly offers
more than can ever be achieved. It is a condition that is mediated not
not

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only through the experience of class, but also through that of race and
gender, and the specific oppressions that they entail. To be poor, and
black, and a woman in a country like Britain is to compound the
experience of poverty and its undermining and debilitating effects.
Poverty is a condition of existence and it is this condition, and what
need to understand. What is more, it is a condition
experienced by many more than those who fall within existing
measurements of the poor.
In this sense also poverty is a relationship. It is to be in a particular
relationship to the wider society and to the dominant value systems and
ideologies through which it operates. It is to be in a dependent relationship to employers, social security officials, housing officers, teachers,
social workers: to a society with very considerable power to label you as
inadequate, stupid, lazy, feckless, deserving or undeserving. Whether
these labels stick or not - and many of the poor would rightly reject
them - is not really the point. The stigma of poverty is so deep-rooted
in western history and culture that the struggle against poverty is not
just a struggle to make impossible ends meet, but also one to maintain a
sense of self-worth and dignity against a society that creates you as a
failure.
As a relationship, poverty cannot be considered in isolation; it is not
a discrete object of social scientific research that can be separated off
from the wider society and understood in its own terms. The meaning
of poverty can only be understood in the context of the power relationships - especially, but not exclusively, those of class, race and gender
that structure peoples access to income and wealth. Poverty makes
no sense without a relationship to wealth, just as the concept of big
makes no sense without the concept of small, for they are two sides of
the same coin. It is this relationship that lies at the heart of the nature
and experience of poverty, and an understanding of this relationship as
the cause of poverty must be the starting point of any attempt to define
and measure it. We need to know what it is we are measuring before we
start to count the numbers.
creates

it, that

we

that is

DE-POLITICISING POVERTY
The modern empiricist framework for the study of poverty which now
dominates our understanding is generally dated back to the work of
Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree at the end of the 19th century in
England. It was these studies and their particular methodological approaches that laid the basis for the concept of the poverty line and the
definition of poverty by level of incomeC4~. But this new conception of
poverty did not occur in a vacuum; rather it sought to replace older and
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more long-standing conceptions of poverty based on the experience of

class. This older tradition, established in popular experience and culture, and theorised in the developing science of political economy that
tried to make sense of the emergence of capitalism, saw poverty as a
class relationship. Thus in the mid-19th century the political economist
Nassau Senior, one of the handful of major state servants responsible
for the construction of 19th-century state intervention (see Corrigan
and Sayer, 1985), had warned of the unfortunate [sic] double meaning
of the word poor ... In its widest acceptance it is opposed to the word
rich; and in its most common use it includes all, except the higher and
middle classes (Senior, 1865, p67, emphasis added). Until the end of
the 19th century poverty had thus been understood and defined, not as
a level of income, or even as a standard of living, but as the condition of
a working class, of a propertyless proletariat. In the words of the
infamous 1834 Poor Law Report itself, poverty ... is the state of one
who, in order to obtain a mere subsistence, is forced to have recourse
to labour (cited Checkland, 1974, p334). To be poor was to have to
labour for a wage for someone else; to be rich was to live off the labour
of others.
The redefinition of poverty and its containment within the empiricist
paradigm that took place towards the end of the 19th century was
essentially political. Faced with growing class antagonisms and social
unrest the explicit task of social reformers became that of separating
the residuum (or what is now referred to as the underclass) from the
remainder of the working class. It was a classic case of divide and rule.
As Booth himself put it:

the question of those who actually suffer from poverty should be considered separately from that of the true working classes
It is the plan
of agitators and the way of sensational writers to confound the two in
one ... Against this method I protest. To confound these essentially
distinct problems is to make the solution of both impossible. It is not by
welding distress and aspirations that any good can be done. (Booth,
...

1904, pl55).
It

was precisely this welding of distress and aspirations that, as in many

revolutionary moments, was to pose the greatest challenge to the existing structures of British society and the state, and out of which was to
emerge the characteristic forms of state welfare provision that persisted
through to the late 20th century (Jones, 1971; Harris, 1972; Novak,
1988). It was this milieu that was also to produce the fragmentation of
political economy into the discrete and separate disciplines of sociology, economics and politics, and that was to see the rise of social

administration and the science of statistics - the supreme embodiment

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of a cramped and atheoretical empiricist philosophy - as the science of

the state, focussed on providing the statistical measurement of social
phenomena as a guide to state action, regulation and control (cf

Abrams, 1968).
Henceforward poverty was to be defined in quantifiable terms.
Indeed, in an age when for social investigation facts were all that
mattered, the measurement of poverty was to become a substitute for

analysis and explanation. Poverty was no longer to be defined as the

condition of a working class, but was seen as the state of those who had
less than a certain quantifiable level of income. The identification of
poverty with the working class - that being poor was not being rich was broken, and with it the threat that this identification posed to the
security and property of the rich was eased. The poor thus came to be
marked out as a distinct and separate minority.
What was lost in this redefinition of poverty was not just a semantic
anachronism better suited to an era before the advance of capitalism
saw a progressive rise in working-class living standards. There is no
reason to suppose that the living standards of the poor in the 19th
century or earlier were any more homogeneous than the living standards of todays working class; on the contrary, inequalities of income
within the working class in the 1990s are greater than they were in the
1880s. Rather, what was lost was a way of understanding poverty that
contained within it both a definition and an explanation for its existence, and a clue as to how to eradicate it.
MEASURING POVERTY
The measurement of poverty remains important, as an indication of
both the extent and the depth of poverty at any one time, and to
indicate the shifts and differing degrees of poverty between different
groups of the poor. Our criteria for the measurement of poverty must,
however, stem from our theory and understanding of poverty. We
cannot just pluck a figure out of the air. Just as the causes of poverty lie
within the core economic and social relationships of capitalist society,
so our measurement of poverty must derive from the same relation-

ships.
In discussing the relative nature of poverty many writers have drawn
on a particular quotation from Marx: Our wants and desires spring
from society; because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative
nature (Marx, 1970, p83). Significantly, in saying this Marx was not
discussing poverty but wages. In his pamphlet entitled Wage Labour
and Capital, he outlined the dependence of the working class upon
wages as a central feature of capitalist production. Wages represent the
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cost of

maintaining and reproducing the working class as a working

class. But wages are not fixed and static: they rise with the increasing
wealth of society, and reflect the growing productivity of labour
through a general rise in standards of living. The average wage thus
represents the average standard of living, the average cost of maintaining and reproducing labour within any given society. This average
wage is of course relative: it reflects the productive power of society the wealth that labour produces - and (in general) rises over time. But
while the average wage of today is considerably higher than it was a
hundred or two hundred years ago, the share of wages in the national
income has remained more or less constant. Compared with previous
periods in history, the average wage - and hence the average standard
of living - has risen; but compared with the wealth that labour produces
compared with the standard of living that society is capable of producing - the average has remained the same.
It is by this standard that poverty has to be measured. I am not a
statistician, and doubtless there are many others more qualified to
devise suitable measures and coefficients that display the shifting parameters of poverty. What I am attempting to argue is that in order to
avoid arbitrary and subjective judgements, measurements of poverty
have to be related to objective criteria that reflect the creation as well
as the distribution of standards of living.
Taking the average income as one indication of a quantifiable
measurement of poverty, one thing that is immediately apparent is that
income distribution is skewed substantially in favour of a minority of
the rich. Thus in Britain, for example, almost two-thirds (62 per cent)
of the population receive less than the average income (DSS 1992: 1).
In 1989 these included 92 per cent of the registered unemployed, 81 per
cent of those aged over 60, and 69 per cent of couples where one
partner was in full-time work.
While in Britain it was the very poorest who suffered most during the
Thatcher decade of the 1980s - with the poorest 10 per cent of the
population experiencing a real cut in living standards of 6 per cent,
compared with a rise in average living standards of 30 per cent - what
was also remarkable was an increasing polarisation of those on middleincome levels as a minority became richer and the majority became
poorer. Thus the period from 1979 to 1989 saw a marked fall in the
number of people in equivalised income bands between about 75 and
200 a week. Also evident is a marked rise in the number of people in
a rise in the
equivalised income bands above 250 a week [and]
number of people in the lowest equivalised income bands, below about
60 a week (ibid, p24). Recent suggestions of a model of a one-third,
two-thirds society in which an impoverished third faces an increasingly

...

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affluent and secure two-thirds perhaps needs some revision, and it may
be more appropriate to talk of a three-thirds society, in which the top
third lives a life of relative security and material prosperity; the bottom
third faces conditions of severe deprivation and exclusion; and a middle
third struggles to maintain its somewhat precarious position. That this
middle third is not normally counted as amongst the poor - either by
social researchers or even by themselves - is what is challenged both by
a new way of thinking about poverty and by the political action that is
necessary to overcome it.
THE CREATION OF POVERTY

Poverty (or for that matter wealth) is

relationship: it is about access to and

in the final analysis a material

control over the material conditions of life. This does not mean that poverty is simply an economic
relationship, for economic relationships are always also social and
political relationships: they are relationships that exist amongst and
between groups of people. They are relationships that embody power
over resources, and in contemporary society these relationships are
deeply gendered and racialised. But such divisions do not in themselves
explain poverty. Neither racism nor (with some qualifications)
patriarchy tell us about the causes of poverty: about why black people
or women are poor, although they tell us everything about the distribution of poverty: about why they are more likely to be poor, and to be
amongst the poorest of the poor, than white people or men. Rather,
the explanation of poverty has to be sought in the class relationships of

capitalist production.
Thus, for Marx, poverty as such begins with the tillers freedom
(Marx, 1973, p735). It was the disintegration of feudal society within
medieval Europe that first produced a class of free labourers: men and
women with no other means of supporting themselves other than their
ability to sell their labour-power in return for a wage. The disbanding
of feudal estates, the enclosure of the land for sheep-farming and
commercial agriculture, and the expropriation of the peasantry produced a class of dispossessed people dependent on the sale of its
labour-power, or on begging, vagabondage and robbery as its only
source of income (Marx, 1973, p507). As the 18th-century historian Sir
Frederick Eden

noted,

even

the word

was new:

It is to the introduction of manufactures, and the consequent emancipation of those dismissed by masters that ... I ascribe the introduction of a
new class of men, henceforward described by the legislature under the
denomination of Poor (Eden, 1796, p57)

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coincidence that this process was to take place first and to be

where by the 18th century the virtual elimination of the peasantry was to provide a source of wage-workers for
the home of the industrial revolution.
This new group of the poor found themselves suspended over a
bottomless chasm of destitution. Unlike slaves or a peasantry, they had
freedom, but this freedom was illusory, for whereas slaves had a
security of subsistence, even in sickness and old age, and whereas a
peasantry was able to obtain its own subsistence from the land, the new
working class was utterly dependent upon securing work and a wage in
order to live. Without employment they would perish, and not surprisingly it was this stark and brutal fact of the new economic, social and
political relationships of capitalism that from the 14th century saw the
state build up its repertoire of relief for the poor (Novak, 1988).
Although the passage of history - aided in no small part by state
policy and ideological activity - has come to present it as natural, this
fundamental relationship remains at the core of contemporary poverty.
It is a relationship that to a considerable extent has always been gendered, through the intervening institution of the family, although the
differential experience of this relationship as between men and women
has historically been progressively undermined. It is this gendered
nature of dependence upon the labour market that means that womens
poverty cannot simply be read off from their class position.
In pre-capitalist society the family or household was the basic unit
both of production and of reproduction. With the development of
capitalism the production of commodities was moved progressively
outside of the home: waged labour became both the basis for this new
form of production, and the means through which most families
secured those commodities necessary for life. To the extent that men
came to monopolise waged labour, women were relegated to the reproduction of domestic life, and dependent on the labour market only
indirectly through the wages earned by men. As an older, and formerly
more central economic and social institution, the family, although substantially challenged and transformed, was not swept away by the
growth of capitalist economic and social relationships. Rather, it has
continued to serve an important function for capitalism as a means through the unpaid domestic labour of women - of securing the maintenance and reproduction of labour at a lower cost than if this had to be
secured through wages alone. It has also enabled capital to take advantage of womens domestic dependency through their employment in the
paid labour market, using ideologies of domesticity (in a similar way
that it has used racism) to secure particularly cheap and exploitable
forms of wage labour.
It

was no

most

complete in England,

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To the extent that men also benefit from this situation, and gain
materially from the unpaid labour of women in the home (see Delphy,
1984), this coincidence of capitalism and patriarchy compounds - both
theoretically and in practice - womens poverty. Intervening between
the chasm of destitution on the one hand, and the compulsion to enter
the labour market on the other, womens (increasingly historic) dependence upon mens wages offered (at least to some women) a retreat

from individual dependence on wage labour, just as it constituted a

new, and more personal, dependence upon individual men. The power
of patriarchy to define this dependent position for women, and the
ability of capital to take advantage of it, both directly (through the
employment of women) and indirectly (through the reduced costs of
reproducing the labour force) has worked in an uneasy relationship,
although always to the detriment of women. As free individuals, many
women face additional discrimination in terms of pay and other conditions of work because they are women; as dependent members of a
family they frequently fall below the living standard of the family as a
whole (Graham and Popay, 1989).
The dependence of women upon the family (or more properly upon a
male wage) for their economic support as an alternative to dependence
upon the labour market is a situation that has become both increasingly
strained and challenged. For the first time in history, women in Britain
now outnumber men as members of the waged labour force, although
thy still fail to equal men in terms of pay, or conditions, or the additional burden of domestic work. As a general pattern, the transformation of a family-based economy that accompanied the rise of capitalism also disguises the fact that from its beginnings many women - both
single and married - worked both outside and inside the home, but
nevertheless the development of waged labour significantly increased
the power of men vis-d-vis women, just as it created new forms of
dependency for both.
Dependence upon the capitalist labour market - whether directly or
indirectly - remains the reality for a majority of the population, and
were it not for the intervention of the state, those unable to secure
employment would equally perish. Indeed, we have only to strip away
the state, with its compulsory transfer of income from those in employment to those out of employment (and to a far lesser extent from those
with high incomes to those with no or little income) to reveal the chasm
beneath. The most recently available statistics show that the distribution of original income in Britain - that is, of income obtained purely
from the free market - gives the poorest 20 per cent of households
only 0.4 per cent of the countrys total income (Central Statistical

Office, 1985, p89).

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It is this too that puts into proper perspective what are often taken to
be the causes of poverty. Old age, sickness, large families, even lack
of paid work, do not in themselves cause poverty, or else the Queen
Mother would have to be counted as amongst the ranks of the poor.
Such factors precipitate a fall into destitution only for those who have
no other means to fall back on. The insecurity that comes with modern
poverty is a reflection of this fundamental divide. Never safe, in a world
capable of abundance, people strive to keep their heads above water,
fearful of losing a job, of being thrown onto the mercies of the state.
The severity of the struggle is inversely related to wealth, and it is the
maintenance of this relationship - of poverty - that is central to capitalism.
THE UNENDING CYCLE OF POVERTY
It is the economic and social relationships of capitalist society - the
division between a minority who own and control the worlds wealth
and those who have no choice but to work for them - that is at one and
the same time both the root cause of poverty and the motor of capitalist
growth and development. In its development over the past two centuries the growth of the productive forces of human society has been
phenomenal. There are few material problems in the world that could
not be solved. Yet poverty remains. It remains despite rising living
standards, even for the poor, and it will remain so long as these productive forces (and the social relationships in which they are embodied)
remain subservient to the logic of capitalist accumulation.
Poverty thus needs to be understood not just as the end-product of a
particular system of distribution - which is how most studies of poverty
approach it - but as an essential precondition for the process of production itself. Poverty is not simply about the way that societys resources
are distributed, but also about the way that these resources are produced. In the early 19th century political economists were at least blunt
(and often arrogant) in their understanding of this:

Poverty is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society,

without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of
civilisation. It is the lot of man - it is the source of wealth, since without
poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no
riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be
possessed of wealth. (Patrick Colquhoun
1806; quoted Rose, 1971, p47)

A Treatise

on

Indigence

For hundreds of millions of people throughout the world the threat of

destitution and starvation remains the ultimate incentive to work,
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flow of hands for the farms, sweat-shops, assembly

lines and offices that make up the world economic order. It is in order
to try to escape the worst consequences of poverty that people spend
their lives in jobs that offer little fulfilment or meaning - that for many
are a serious risk to mental and physical health - only to find that old
age, sickness or unemployment will throw them down to the bottom of
the scale again. Few ever really escape the remorseless pressure.
Even in societies where hunger is no longer (at least for the majority
of the poor) the pressure it once was, new pressures and incentives are
brought to bear in the creation of a universal, perpetual never-satisfied
desire for something better than anything that is ever achieved (Rea,
1912, p8). The vast resources and ingenuity of advertising industries are
brought to bear to persuade people they both want and need things
they had previously never imagined, yet, for the majority, the good life
remains always just beyond reach, and, often saddled with debt, work
is the only way to try and keep up.
Even the so-called middle class are not wholly immune from this
remorseless pressure. Over the past hundred years this class of professionals, managers and others who stand in between the working class
on the one hand and the owners of capital on the other has grown
enormously. In many ways they remain a paradox: objectively, they
too are dependent upon waged (or in their terms salaried) employment, but on the whole this middle class is protected from the full
consequences of its economic position. Greater ease and security of
employment, above-average levels of remuneration and greater protection against the vicissitudes of old age or sickness through pensions and
other benefits operate both to remove the pressures of poverty and to
secure their allegiance to the status quo. Yet even for them, the threat
of losing a job, of forced redundancy or chronic sickness, remains
constantly in the background, and with that the very real possibility of
destitution.
It is a condition of life that many people consider as natural, or at
least as inevitable, and not as the product of historical and human
agency: as a condition that is the product of economic and social relationships that had a specific historical origin, that serve particular and
powerful interests, and that, like all human relationships, are capable
of being transformed.

ensuring a steady

THINKING GLOBALLY
It is only by seeing poverty as a process and as a relationship, rather
than a quantifiable level of income, that we can begin to make meaningful comparisons between societies. This international comparison is,
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moreover, crucial

as the growth of a capitalist world economic order

demands our understanding of its effects on the distribution of poverty
both between and within particular countries.
Equating poverty in the third world with that in the most advanced
capitalist societies has always been problematical. For many people,
faced with widespread malnutrition, destitution, even starvation, the
poverty of the third world appears as real poverty, in a way that the
relative poverty of the first world is not. But starvation is not the same
as poverty: people die for lack of food, but poor people live, and once
we talk about life we have to talk about the quality of life. Throughout
most of the third world, the same process that in Europe took centuries
to achieve now takes place within a single generation. Millions of
peasants and subsistence farmers are turned off the land by the
encroachment of capitalist agriculture and, landless and propertyless,
seek employment back on the land or flock to the swelling slums of the
cities in search of work and subsistence (see, for example, George,

1976; Harrison, 1980).

Importantly, many of our images of poverty in the third world stem

from the portrayal of starving adults and children in countries like the
Sudan or Ethiopia. It is a grossly distorted picture that masks the wider
reality of poverty in the third world as well as its similarities with the
poverty of the rest. For most of the poor of the third world, poverty
does not mean starvation but an endless round of work in factories,
fields and mines; a constant struggle of people to keep their heads
above water and to secure an income that will deliver the ever-elusive
and increasingly international images of lifestyle that a worldwide
media now presents. Nor is the manifestation of this poverty so very
different from that which exists in the richest countries of the world.
Low-paid workers in the advanced capitalist societies find themselves
working for so-called third-world wages; child labour is an increasing
phenomenon in both; life expectancy in Harlem, New York, is less than
that in Mexico. There are many startling points of comparison, and the
two become increasingly similar as the international economic order
exercises its power to shift production from the first world to the third
world, and even back again, in a relentless drive to secure the most
profitable conditions for production.
Certainly as a whole the poor of the third world endure a lower
standard of living than most of the poor of the advanced capitalist
economies, and the lack of effective state systems in many third-world
societies to transfer income poses a growing problem of the sort faced
and (temporarily) resolved in the west in the form of the now embattled
welfare state, but the underlying process is the same.
That there is a levelling in the distribution of poverty across the globe
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is no great cause for rejoicing, and for many years it will remain that the
countries of the third world will continue to house the poorest of the
worlds poor, just as they also contain some of the richest of the rich. It
is also, of course, more than just coincidence that - both nationally and
internationally - the poorest of the poor are people of colour. Racism
structures the experience and distribution of poverty not only throughout the world but, with especially pernicious effect, within the whitedominated societies of the west. The complex history of European
capitalism and imperialist expansion in the creation of a world economic order has cemented, and to a considerable extent fixed, an inequality between nations. At the same time it has brought this inequality, and the racism through which it has for long been justified and
legitimated, into the centres of western capitalism itself. Here racism
intensifies the poverty of black populations, while at the same time
obscuring the common interests of the poor as a whole.
The increasing strains of the new world economic order, with its
pressures on migration and the ways these are used to conjure up new
threats to the relative prosperity of richer countries, mean that our
understanding of and responses to poverty need to move from a
national to a global plane. It is the same relationships, the same forces,
the same processes that create and sustain poverty, and that produce
the same situation in every country where hardship and suffering exist
not only alongside abundance and plenty, but do so despite the fact that
human ingenuity, inventiveness and productivity have created the conditions to put an end to all this. Modern poverty is not the product of
scarcity, but the mirror of abundance, but an abundance whose benefit
to the few depends upon the continuation of the poverty of the many.
Tony Novak works in the Department of Applied Social Studies, University of Bradford.

Acknowledgement
I

am

mdebted to Chris Jones for his patient cnticism and

drafts that this article has undergone

unending support through

the

vanous

References
1 I am grateful to Ruth Lister for helping to clarify this distinction.
2 Amartya Sen, however, in his attempt to get away from what he sees as the mistake of substituting
relative poverty for concepts of inequality, as well as to revive what he considers the irreducible core of
poverty, has argued for a new interpretation of the term absolute poverty based not on physical need,
but on peoples capabilities (Sen, 1985) While it is an interesting argument it is, as Peter Townsend
argues, ultimately unsuccessful (Townsend, 1985)
3 Some of the problems of these definitions are discussed, although not resolved, in Piachaud (1987)
4 As Paul Spicker (1990) has rightly pointed out, it was Rowntree rather than Booth who was primarily

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responsible for the elaboration of a minimal poverty line related to income,

define the poor as a minority of the population remains predominant

although Booths attempt to

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