The world’s population is divided into two classes: a capitalist class and a working class.
The capitalist do not have to work do because they own the means of production and distribution protected by the police and armed forces of the State as private property. The capitalists, by their shareholding, are the owners of raw resources, the land, transport, communication systems and so on.
The workers – all those who are dependent for their existence on the sale of their labour-power (their mental and physical abilities to work) are a propertyless class. And it is by being propertyless that they live in poverty or varying degrees of poverty. There poverty arises because they do not have direct access to what they produce and are prohibited from using production as a means to directly meet people’s needs.
The workers produce wealth for the capitalists and not for themselves. Out of the social wealth produced, the capitalists return to the workers in the form of wages and salaries, an amount which is sufficient to maintain them in a state of reasonable health and to reproduce future workers. The surplus produced by the workers, after meeting the expenses of production, distribution and the State machinery, is kept by the properties class.
Capitalism is the cause of the social and economic problems that face the working class today. Under the profit system the workers are, in the strictest sense, poor, that is, workers and their families lack the means to afford the best that is available.
This is not the case for the capitalist class.
The wealth held by the richest strata of the capitalist class runs into trillions of dollars, if you can imagine that figure. According to Forbes’s list there are in 1924 a record 2,781 billionaires with a total net wealth of $14.2 trillion. This is an increase of 141 members and $2 trillion from 2023, which held the previous record for the highest net worth gain on the list, surpassing the $900 billion record set in 2022. Two-thirds of the list members are wealthier compared to the previous year, including Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth increased by $112.6 billion.
What of the poor, those who are living in extreme poverty. According to the latest poverty statistics (World Bank, November 2024) approximately 9.2% of the global population, or about700 million people, live in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined by the World Bank as someone living on $2.15 per day. Most people living in extreme poovery are found residing in sub–Saharan Africa and South Asia.
In addition to those living in extreme poverty, about 26% of the global population, or about 2.1 billion people live in what is referred to as “moderate poverty”. Moderate poverty is defined by the World Bank as someone living on less than $6.85 per day.
Poverty disproportionately affects children, with half the world’s poor being children under the age of 18. Roughly 1 billion children worldwide experience multidimensional poverty – meaning they lack necessities like food, water, shelter, education and health care (UNICEF 2024).
Here are some statistics from the Word Bank for October 2024
“Global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020-2030 set to be a lost decade.
8.5 percent of the global population – almost 700 million people – live today on less than $2.15 per day, the extreme poverty line relevant for low-income countries. Three-quarters of all people in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa or in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
44 percent of the global population – around 3.5 billion people – live today on less than $6.85 per day, the poverty line relevant for upper-middle-income countries. The total number of people living under this poverty line has barely changed since 1990 due to population growth.
Progress on shared prosperity has stalled since the pandemic, due to slow economic growth and a divergence in mean incomes. Today, incomes around the world, on average, would have to increase five-fold to reach the level of $25 per person per day, the minimum prosperity standard for high-income countries.
Around one-fifth of the world’s population lives in economies with high inequality, concentrated mostly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Only 7 percent of the global population lives in countries with low inequality.
Climate change poses a fundamental risk to poverty and inequality reduction. Nearly 1 in 5 people globally are likely to experience a severe weather shock in their lifetime from which they will struggle to recover.
Climate change also threatens to increase global inequality, as poorer countries and people are likely to suffer more from the negative consequences”.
Although the World Bank and the United Nations are useful for showing the global poverty inflicted onto the working class, these organisation carry a failure of all reformist organisations in believing that poverty can be resolved while keeping the profit system, It cannot be done for capitalism needs the working class to be poor and dependent on daily employment for most of their lives in order to live. If workers could exist without having to sell their mental and physical ability to work to the capitalists, then the profit system would not function and the capitalist class and the billionaires within this class would not get their unearned income of rent, interest and profit.
Socialists look on global destitution of our class with dismay. What a waste of human potential. What a loss of skills to create a global system of production directly to meet human needs like housing, food and communication. To solve poverty and other problems cause by capitalism like war and climate change, the global working class must abolish capitalism and replace the profit system with socialism. This will involve a social revolution, changing the basis of society from class to common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution.
