Re:Japan's Growing Poverty Defies Glib Explanations
by mafribe on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @06:05AM
(#11579068)
the poverty line as the 40th percentile
of income [...] was absurd.
It's best understood not as a honest attempt at understanding poverty, but as a political manoeuvre.
In the past (19th century and before), the socialist/communist tradition had a real point in that large swathes of the population were poor in an absolute sense (e.g. going hungry, cold, no adequate health-care, pension etc). The socialist/communist tradition was in some sense about abolishing absolute poverty (whether the proposed methods were helpful or not is another discussion). If you read e.g. the communist manifesto [1], that is clear. Most of socialist/communist politics centered around politicising and radicalising the absolute poor with a view towards taking them out of absolute poverty.
However, modern industrialised society has (simplifying a bit) abolished absolute poverty.
This leaves socialist/communist politics in a conundrum: how to continue to politicise/radicalise people to become followers. The concept of relative poverty is the answer: all the old political tools can be reused by changing what is meant by poverty.
In the past (19th century and before), the socialist/communist tradition had a real point in that large swathes of the population were poor in an absolute sense (e.g. going hungry, cold, no adequate health-care, pension etc). The socialist/communist tradition was in some sense about abolishing absolute poverty (whether the proposed methods were helpful or not is another discussion). If you read e.g. the communist manifesto [1], that is clear. Most of socialist/communist politics centered around politicising and radicalising the absolute poor with a view towards taking them out of absolute poverty.
However, modern industrialised society has (simplifying a bit) abolished absolute poverty.
This leaves socialist/communist politics in a conundrum: how to continue to politicise/radicalise people to become followers. The concept of relative poverty is the answer: all the old political tools can be reused by changing what is meant by poverty.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...