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Poverty In The High-Income Countries: A Marxist Alternative To Mainstream Ideologies, Jamie A. Gough, Aram Eisenschitz

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Poverty has been present in all the advanced capitalist countries since the dawn of industrial capitalism in the late 18C, and remains so to this day. Mainstream explanations of this phenomenon are superficial and mistake symptoms for causes. In this article we present a Marxist explanation of poverty in the high-income countries since the late 19C. We show how poverty is systematically produced by the dynamics of capital accumulation and the capital-labour relation, including their spatial dynamics, operating in the realms of production, social reproduction, and their mediations by the state. Since poverty is produced by the totality of society, …