By Pasqualina Curcio on October 25, 2021
Some say that socialism is a failure, that it generates hunger and misery. In contrast, and as part of the hegemonic discourse that has managed to permeate the imagination of billions of people, they say that capitalism is the model to follow. According to them, the latter is successful.
The facts and figures show the opposite, more than 95% of countries worldwide are capitalist, and yet humanity is plagued by hunger, poverty and misery despite all that has been produced. From 1800 to 2016, world production per capita increased 1,234% (Maddison Project Database 2020), that is, these last two centuries of capitalism production increased in greater proportion than the population, but 2.3 billion people go hungry daily and 6 million die every year because they have nothing to eat. And is it not the working class that added value and increased production with its labor force?
The main and determining cause of poverty in this world is inequality, it is not, as some say, because little is produced, much less is it associated with the manipulative and malicious discourse in which it is stated that the poor are poor because they are not productive, or because they are lazy, lazy and wasteful. The problem lies in the unequal way in which this production has been distributed, which, in capitalism, is concentrated in a few hands (the bourgeois class, owners of capital) leaving crumbs to be distributed among the great majority (the working class, owners of the labor force and true producers). According to OXFAM, in 2018, 1% of the world’s population appropriated 80% of all that was produced, and the remaining 20% was what was distributed among 99% of the population.
In Our America, with the exception of Cuba, all countries are capitalist, there is hunger and there is misery, we are the region with the greatest poverty and the most unequal in the world. In 2016, Alicia Bárcenas, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), said, “Latin America continues to be the most unequal region in the world. In 2014, the richest 10% of Latin America’s population had amassed 71% of the region’s wealth. According to Oxfam’s calculations, if this trend were to continue, in just six years the richest 1% of the region would have more wealth than the remaining 99%.”
In the pandemic, the forecasts fell short: in 2020, the number of billionaires in the region rose 41%, from 76 billionaires (people with wealth over US$ 1 billion) to 107, and their accumulated fortune increased 61%, from US$ 284 billion to US$ 480 billion in one year. The countries with the most billionaires are: Brazil (66), Mexico (14), Chile (9), Peru (6), Colombia (5), Argentina (5) (BBC News World, July 2021).
Knowing where and how these inequalities originate is fundamental. The distribution of what is produced is concretized in the social process of production itself; it is at that moment that production is distributed between the workers and the owners of capital. Whether more or less goes to each depends on the level of wages, if this is higher, the profit will be lower and vice versa. This distribution is measured and published by all the countries of the world following the IMF manuals, it is known as factorial distribution of income, and for this they use two categories: 1) remuneration of wage earners and 2) gross surplus of exploitation ( it is just as you are reading it, the aforementioned organization, which is not Marxist, refers to profit as exploitation). Therefore, given a given production, to the extent that the remuneration to wage earners is lower, exploitation (or profit) will be higher.
The greater the inequality, the greater the poverty, hunger and misery.
According to ECLAC, in 2020, out of every 100 inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean, 34 were living in poverty, i.e., their income (mostly from wages) did not cover the basic food basket. Of those 34 inhabitants, 13 were in extreme poverty, i.e., not only could they not cover the basic food basket, but they could not even afford the food basket. We are talking about 209 million poor people in 2020 (22 million more than in 2019) and 78 million in extreme poverty (8 million more than in 2019).
Hunger is a manifestation of poverty, as is indigence or mortality from preventable causes or illiteracy or overcrowding. According to ECLAC data, in 2020, food insecurity (severe and moderate) reached 40% of the population of Our America, that is, 249 million people did not have regular and sufficient access to food (in 2019 food insecurity was 33.8%). Simultaneously, in this capitalist system that predominates in our region, 220 million tons of food are discarded (thrown to the dump) per year, 11.6% of the food produced, equivalent to US$ 150 billion (FAO, “The State of Food and Agriculture 2019”).
Meanwhile, in 2020, the wealth of the region’s billionaires increased 61%, in a scenario in which, incidentally, production fell 6.8%. So, if the cake to be distributed is smaller because less was produced and the rich became richer and the poor became poorer, it is because this cake was distributed much more unequally than before: what went to wages, in proportion was much lower and what went to exploitation/profit (paraphrasing the IMF) was much higher. Is poverty and its manifestations (hunger and misery) a consequence of the unequal distribution of what is produced?
Reducing poverty is an important banner of struggle, of course it is, as is the fight against hunger and misery, but this problem is not solved with welfare policies focused on the extreme poor, it is not a matter of specific subsidies or bags of food in the best neoliberal style, the problem goes beyond that, it is a matter of justice in the distribution of production in the social process of work itself, This is only possible (in the framework of private ownership of the means of production) through higher wage levels to prevent the bourgeois from misappropriating the value of the labor force of the worker who is the one who, in the end, adds value to the economy, that is, the one who produces.
Source: Ultimas Noticias, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English