Rethinking Poverty: Class and Ethical Dimensions of Poverty Eradication

摘要

Marxism and poverty have always lived a contradictory existence, especially in the global South. While socialism/communism's ethical imperative aspires to create a nonexploitative society, poverty eradication has been concerned with overcoming the material threat to people's livelihoods. An exploitation-free world does not necessarily mean the eradication of poverty, while the eradication of poverty does not automatically entail the erasure of exploitative relations. Struggles to eradicate poverty are distributional problems pertaining to the allotment of social surplus, which is also a class question since production surplus originates there. Correcting the injustice of poverty is not simply a distributional question, as most discourses on poverty tend to emphasize. Not only is it also a question of production, but it is very much a class question as well.