A pobreza no contexto da sociabilidade capitalista

Abstract

This article presents a theoretical reflection about poverty in the context of capitalist sociability. Its purpose is to investigate the causal links that generate poverty in this form of society. To do so, we initially performed a historical analysis of poverty in pre-capitalist society and the background for the formation of capitalist sociability. We take as theoretical basis in the first section the writings of Michel Mollat and Harold Laski. With the aim of apprehending the foundation of poverty in capitalism that requires the study of the social relation between capital and labor, placed in the productive base of this society, we focus on the theoretical elaborations of Karl Marx, more precisely of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, which enabled a direct approach to the determinants that generate poverty in the productive base of the current order. We also investigate, on the basis of the analyzes carried out by István Mészáros, the function of the modern state and its complementary and ineliminable relationship with capital and, finally, how the state acts in relation to the struggle against poverty in the realm of capitalism. Thus, we find that poverty in capitalism is not a product of the insufficient development of the productive forces, or of the inability to manage the political and economic dimensions. Poverty is first and foremost the product of the process of capital accumulation which, in its uncontrollable and contradictory form, produces and accumulates wealth in proportions equivalent to the production and reproduction of absolute and relative poverty.