by PRABHAT PATNAIK
Poverty is taken to be a homogeneous phenomenon irrespective of the mode of production that is under consideration. Even reputed economists believe in this homogeneous conception of poverty.
In fact, however, poverty under capitalism is entirely different from poverty in pre-capitalist times. Even if for statistical purposes poverty is defined as lack of access to a set of use-values that are essential for living irrespective of the mode of production, the fact remains that this lack is enmeshed under capitalism within a set of social relationships that are sui generis and different from earlier. Poverty under capitalism thus takes a specific form associated with insecurity and indignity that makes it particularly unbearable.
There are roughly four proximate features of capitalist poverty. The first arises from the inviolability of contracts, which means that irrespective of their conditions, the poor have to pay whatever they are contracted to pay; this leads to a loss of assets or destitution.
In pre-capitalist times, for instance in Mughal India, revenue demand was a proportion of the produce; this meant that in years of poor harvest, the revenue claims on the peasants got automatically scaled down. Put differently, the burden of the poor harvest got shared among the producers and the overlord.
But, in colonial India, reflecting its capitalist ethos, the tax got levied on land; the contract between the producer and the overlord changed: the producer would be allowed to cultivate a plot of land provided he paid a certain amount of revenue to the State. This meant that in a poor harvest year, the burden of the poor harvest was not shared and fell exclusively on the producer. The contract, in other words, was for a fixed amount of money payment, not for a variable amount of payment, as a share of the produce or its equivalent in money form. The destitution of the peasantry, that is, the transfer of peasants’ assets to money lenders followed from this. Poverty, in short, was associated with destitution which, therefore, tended to have a cumulative impact on the producers.
Put differently, the “flow” lack of access to use-values on the part of the producers was accompanied by a process of their “stock” deprivation of assets, which meant an increase in their vulnerability over time. There was thus a dynamic introduced into poverty.
The second feature of capitalist poverty is that it is experienced by individuals, whether individual persons or households. In a pre-capitalist society where people lived in communities, other members of the community, whether belonging to the same caste-group or simply to the same village, came to the help of the poor in particular years of bad harvests or natural calamities. Privations, in other, words were not suffered in isolation.
Under capitalism, however, when the communities are broken up because of the inexorable logic of the system, and the individual emerges as the primary economic category, this individual also suffers privations in isolation.
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