Wed, Aug 02, 2006 page9

• The free market and its relation to global poverty

  • By Jeremy Seabrook / THE GUARDIAN
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  The collapse of the Doha "development" round of trade talks has been widely lamented as bad news for the world's poor. But poverty is not exclusive to developing countries, and there is little danger that the poor are going to become an endangered species, whatever the deal on trade.

  Poverty is not a static condition that people may be rescued from or "raised out of." Poverty has as many guises as the words that describe it: the destitution of the landless laborer is not the exclusion of the city slum dweller; the elective austerity of the religious foundation is a million miles away from a drought-stricken tribal village in Orissa; and the violent dispossession of the Rio favela, or squatter settlements, is not the same thing as the scarcity of a lean season in Bangladesh.

  As Western governments never cease to affirm, poverty is relative (although they do not state what it is relative to: whether to neighbors, to the rich, or to those whose personal fortunes outstrip the GDP of whole countries). If anyone with below 60% of median national income is said to remain in poverty, a significant proportion of the people will always be poor. It should not be imagined that poverty in the rich countries is a mitigated or sheltered experience, as the existence of guns and violent crime, a knife culture, gang warfare and a drug economy testifies.

  There is an even more compelling reason why poverty is destined to remain a specter at the global feast. Poverty will not be eliminated for the very reason that the global developmental paradigm gives priority to the market over government, and even to the market over society. Governments everywhere have more or less voluntarily withdrawn from responsibility for distributive justice, and since free markets distribute their rewards according to their own promiscuous and capricious laws, this ensures that wealth flows unevenly.

  This means that those who are not beneficiaries of an expanding and increasingly internationalized economy have diminishing redress for their poverty. Governments routinely express their desire to create a more equal society, and make provisions to alleviate the worst sufferings of the poor. But their capacity to do so is far behind the adroit ability of markets to lavish prizes on those they favor. Indeed, governments have been weakened by a globally integrated economy that permits finance to move so easily, but does all it can to prevent the movement of the peoples of the world to where they might command higher wages.

  Since wealth may rest wherever it can regenerate and reproduce itself most readily, governments throughout the world have had to abandon that modest tribute of wealth that the rich have called "punitive taxation." Even modest demands by government upon the heavy purses of privilege may be evaded by the instant disappearance of billions of dollars into havens, gilded exile and offshore hideaways.

  Perhaps the most astonishing obstacle to the removal of poverty from the world has been the transformation of the super-rich. These people have ceased to be regarded as the greedy devourers of the substance of the poor, the ugly monopolists of resources: no longer the exploiters and bloodsuckers of 19th-century industrial lore, they have been turned into philanthropists, the virtuous possessors of fabulous fortunes, by whose grace and charity alone the dire poverty of the destitute will be relieved.

  The world's richest individuals are now competitive even in their generosity. Lucre has been cleansed of its filth and plutocrats have become svelte. A residual antagonism may remain at the self-awarded emoluments of fat cats but, in general, antagonism between rich and poor has been allayed by a shared commitment to the creation of wealth, in which the poor become pensioners of opulence and not its enemies.

  It is impossible to overestimate the significance of this metamorphosis of the rich. It turns the poor from disputants over the distribution of wealth into petitioners for the overflow of abundance. In the process, it goes without saying, the poor have been demobilized from the struggle for social justice. Not that they should worry: hasn't an international community leapt in to take upon itself the burden of establishing economic and social justice, to take the bitterness out of quarrels over resources, and keep the combatants in a defunct class war at a distance from one another? This is the significance of the UN's Millennium Goals, and the assumption by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the formulation of poverty reduction strategies, as well as the exaltations of pop stars, donors and charitable institutions in their campaigns against the malignant abstraction that is poverty.

  Any remaining conflict between rich and poor is lost in these heroic and altruistic endeavors, since the whole world is now committed to the relief of poverty. In this benign undertaking, poor people are robbed -- yet again -- of any agency in the abatement of their poverty, except insofar as they consent to become "stakeholders" or "partners" in some work of improvement with those who hold the global purse strings.

  Of course, certain "indicators" exist to demonstrate the effectiveness of these efforts, especially in relation to the redemption of those languishing in "absolute poverty." In the light of this it is, perhaps, astonishing that those wallowing in absolute wealth have so far been unable to prevent the misery of the thousands of avoidable deaths daily from malnutrition, waterborne diseases or AIDS.

  The most damning critique of the existing development paradigm is not so much that it is unable to "cure" poverty, damning though that is; it is rather that out of the very abundance of its ability to produce, it manages to create new forms of poverty. Poverty is not a question of the laggards and those left behind by globalization, but remains an inescapable and structural necessity -- required to justify continued growth and expansion beyond sufficiency. Natural scarcity gives way to impoverishments made by humans: this is recognized in the word "deprivation" which, like many terms in the lexicon of poverty, betrays its meaning. Deprivation means something is taken away from people, in order to keep them in a state of poverty to which they will never become accustomed; thereby justifying a system that lays waste to a world without meeting more than a fraction of human need.

  Jeremy Seabrook is the author of The No Nonsense Guide to World Poverty.
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