| This question <579|579> overall <578|580> Yenom: <563-2|628>. graded A |
| Question 726: What is pauperism? |
| What is its relationship to the relative surplus population? |
| Discuss contemporary forms of pauperism. |
| Which political actions can one expect from paupers and why? |
| [579] Yenom: The Radical Footsoldiers. Pauperism is the dregs of the surplus population. “Pauperism is the infirmery of the active labor-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army” 797:2. This class of society consists of the people who have been crushed by the deprivation of productive employment. The unemployment they, or their parents, have endured have either crushed their will or has deprived them of the skills necessary for work. While occasionally extreme labor demand will pull these people into the work force, for the most part they will always remain without any sort of productive employment. |
| In the US this has manifest itself in the projects, gangs and in homelessness. These people for the most part will never be rehabilitated back into any sort of normal life, they have been deprived for to long. In recent US history political action of most of these people has been very small, they are for the most part nihilistic and have no self efficacy beliefs. |
| But another more dangerous form exists in the modern world, and that is when this group feels they have absolutly nothing to lose and is organized to action by an elite. This was plainly evident during my recent summer in Palestine, especially in the refugee camps. Suicide bombers are created by severe economic deprivation. The people in the refugee camps have very little access to jobs, little opportunity to ever afford to leave their camps and if they do through hard work in school get to attend University there are no jobs for them anyway. Add to this that many families of suicide bombers receive a good deal of money from Arab governments, why not perform such an act to help the people you love? The Israelis to combat this have resorted to bulldozing their families' houses, but this just furthers the cycle of violence. |
| And it's not only in the Middle East that examples of this abound, in Columbia kidnapping has become one of the more profitable businesses. In Rawanda what else do the warring tribes have to do but fight each other? And yet in spite of the fact that according to neoclasical supply and demand these places should have plenty of capital flowing to them as their labor is cheaper, there is net capital outflow from these and all of the third world to the developed countries. Perhaps this is because of the drive to exploit less people with more capital but that is another question. |
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