Why poverty remains in a rich society

Over 90 years ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that the grandchildren of his readers would have to work only 15 hours a week to assure a good living standard for all.

Now, even at a time of relatively low unemployment, millions are going short of basics like food and heating. Many thousands are homeless on the streets, and many more crammed into substandard or overcrowded accommodation.

Poverty still blights lives. And in recent years the average working week, after decades of gradually getting shorter, has been getting longer again.

Keynes was not wrong about labour productivity increasing. In fact for much of those 90 years it increased faster than it did in his day.

Probably most poor people today have fridges and TVs and phones, which even well-off people in Keynes’s time didn’t have. They end up unable to take part as equals in society — unable to ask a friend round to their house, or to meet that friend in a café or bar, for example — and even short of the basics, because of capitalism, and in particular because of the endemic insecurity of working-class life under capitalism.

Capital needs a constant “reserve army of labour”, a pool of people desperate to get wage-work at the lowest-rate. It works constantly to reduce its “labour costs”, by replacing workers by machines and squeezing more labour out of working hours.

Thus, as Marx explained in Capital, many even in what he called “the aristocracy of labour” can be thrown into poverty from one year to the next.

They lose their job (or one of their jobs, for those many these days working two or three jobs). They have domestic crises which force them to pay to set up a new household. If they receive state benefits, they fall into difficulties and end up with “sanctions”, deduction from the benefits which reduce them below subsistence level.

Capitalism is an ever-rolling machine to produce wealth for the rich and produce insecurity and poverty at the other pole.

Socialism means “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. No more ultra-rich, and no-one going short of the basics.