culture & poverty/ culture $ wealth

Roger Odisio rodisio at igc.org
Thu Jul 15 10:35:06 PDT 1999


Wojtek,

Excuse me. Like you I enter this debate in the middle without having followed all of it. But it seems to me you are addressing a different question than was Charles and Ange. To put the difference starkly, they are discussing the cause of poverty--why are people poor--and you are discussing why people acquiesce (that's a better word than cooperate, I think) in their poverty.

If I may be so bold (and putting their thoughts in my terms), Charles and Ange say people are poor *because* others are rich. Control of the surplus by a few, which creates the unequal exchange in labor markets, produces poverty. The extent and distribution of that poverty is then determined by the playing out of the forces and social relations of production. Cultural, physical, or cognitive explanations have no bearing on this root cause, but are instead a bourgeois diversion. They only affect the distribution of poverty; they don't cause it.

But cultural factors do affect working class perceptions and are used by capital to help in the reproduction of capitalist social relations, as you suggest. In short, cultural factors affect both capital and labor in their social interaction. But the use of culture is only one of many weapons capital has to reproduce capitalist relations (earlier you had said that the culture of poverty argument is the only explanation of how capitalist oppression can reproduce itself without the use of overt force).



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