Deep Thoughts: the poor as a structural component of capitalism

From K-Punk:
All the justified furore about the power elite using Katrina as a cover under which they can 'get rid of the poor' from New Orleans should be nuanced. We need to understand the way in which the desire to 'get rid of the poor' is a garbled utopian impulse which exposes one of capitalism's fundamental fantasies.

Why is it that the desire to eliminate poverty - which, presumably, we all share - inevitably becomes a desire to eliminate the poor? It is because, in capitalist ideology, poverty has to be thought of as an ethnic, rather than a social or economic, trait. The poor are those who are genetically destined to fail, those who lack 'middle-class skills' as the Herald and Tribune put it the other day (middle class skills here does not mean the skills possessed by middle class people, but the skill of being middle class). Populocide (or ethnocide) replaces socio-economic overhaul.

But this desire to eliminate the poor is also disingenuous in another way. The poor cannot be eliminated under capitalism - only airbrushed out of the picture, moved somewhere else. Naturally, however, this can never be admitted, since to do so would be to give up the fantasy that poverty is a contingent feature of capitalist societies rather than a structural requirement.

Comment by lenin:
Abolishing the poor:
Poverty must be eliminated, hence, the poor are to be gotten rid of. But, as K-Punk points out, this is impossible: the 'poor' - a neutered term, cleansed of any Marxist associations, denuded of agency, 'the poor' are merely their condition and not their action - cannot be abolished or gotten rid of any more than capital, labour, interest, prices, wages or any of the other commonplaces of capitalist society can (without abolishing capitalism).

K-Punk says "in capitalist ideology, poverty has to be thought of as an ethnic, rather than a social or economic, trait." It is a sharp point. Here is an account from New Orleans by Christian Parenti:

Archie Haley, an emergency medical technician from Oak Grove, near the Arkansas border, squats as I scarf down a military MRE food ration; he explains that the major problem is "the large population of welfare-ized blacks who can't help themselves." My interlocutor is white like me, so he feels comfortable. "See, these people are the city's disease."

Of course, there is a sense in which racialising the question plays into the hands of racists and hand-wringing liberals. Although the racism at the heart of American power and its modes of legitimisation is manifest, more now than for a long time, there is a point at which the disavowed racism of the elite simply comes to the fore. These guys are 'insurgents', 'looters', 'welfarised blacks', too accustomed to hand-outs, loot from robberies and Malcolm X. The uses for the capitalist class of ethnicising poverty and its effects are simply enormous. Naturally, everyone acknowledges that there are 'white poor', but they too are treated in a very similar fashion to the 'black poor' as being somehow marginal to the system of exploitation. For instance, where does the term 'red neck' come from? It refers to mule farmers working outdoors in the sun - white guys who didn't tan too well. They were, are, among the most exploited of the working class, the most impoverished. And they are stigmatised in a very similar fashion. Division and conquest never have emerged from the millenia-old honeymoon.

When Thomas Franks complains about the poor whites voting for Bush to have a dig at Wall Street, he is not merely beating his gums together in exasperation at the ign'ant povo whites. He touches on a real consequence of reducing politics to a multicultural mantra: sex, race, gender, class ... Class is the one thing that one daren't mention in connection with the United States if one is a resident there. It induces, or used to induce until recently, gales of laughter. Class exploitation is the obscene underside of life in modern capitalism, one that can only be represented in claustrophobic underground scenes of Dr Evil acolytes milling busily around ...

So how ought 'the poor' to respond to the Manifest Callousness of their ruling class? I defer to Oscar Wilde:

The best amongst [the poor] are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious ... Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates which is considered a form of stealing. Further: [The reformers'] remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it ... The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, folks, looks a lot better than it does under ten feet of sewage-filled water.