The Class Analysis of Poverty

Abstract

To understand more fully the nature of poverty it must be viewed as the result, in part, of inherent features of the social system. The author describes four general approaches to explaining poverty: poverty as a result of inherent individual attributes, as the by-product of contingent individual characteristics, as a by-product of social causes, and as a result of inherent properties of the social system. He then elaborates a class exploitation analysis of poverty by explaining how economic oppression, economic exploitation, and class generate a social system in which poverty plays a crucial functional role. The general problem of poverty must be broken down into two subproblems: poverty generated inside exploitative relations (the working poor) and poverty generated by nonexploitative oppression (the underclass). A class analysis of poverty argues that significant numbers of privileged people have a strong, positive material interest in maintaining poverty. Poverty can be reduced in the United States only through popular mobilization of pressure that challenges the power of the dominant classes.