Another common theme you’ll encounter often: poverty is the “natural” state of humanity.

Let’s unpack.

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It is undoubtedly true that, under modern capitalism, there is a lot more material *stuff.* But is *stuff* the proper measure of poverty?

2/ https://twitter.com/mgschmelzer/status/1370682664882147329

As with so many other aspects of modern life, our concept of “poverty” depends inextricably from a misunderstanding of what life was like *before* capitalism. In the popular imagination, it was one of endless toil on the cusp of starvation and ruin.

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But, as Graeber and Wengrow have pointed out, our pre-modern ancestors enjoyed many material and non-material amenities that many of us, even in the richest countries, cannot afford.

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https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

Widerquist and McCall point out in “Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy” that many people in capitalist states are considerably *worse* off than our pre-modern ancestors living in subsistence economies.

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But poverty is not *truly* an issue of material deprivation. We know this because poverty has observable, predictable effects of health—even though today’s poor have refrigerators and cell phones.

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https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/01/401251/poor-health-when-poverty-becomes-disease

It’s worth considering: what are wealth and poverty? All wealth is ultimately social: an ability to claim property beyond your immediate personal use and control, and, through this property, command the labor of others.

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Poverty, then, is the antithesis of wealth: being without property, and having one’s labor subject to the command of those with property in order to access the resources needed to survive.

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Widerquist, in his exquisitely brilliant dissertation at Oxford, constructs poverty in exactly this manner: as a social relationship to property rather than a simple material deprivation.

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a73bad11-7004-43f2-a02d-5ed151078476/download_file?file_format=pdf&safe_filename=602157101.pdf&type_of_work=Thesis

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That is, poverty is a *social* relationship, the state of lacking access to resources with which one could sustain oneself through one’s own labor. This social deprivation is what results in material deprivation.

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As Widerquist and McCall note, poverty in the modern world is not a *lack* or *absence* of material wealth. It is a function of access and distribution.

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A regime of private property necessarily requires people without property to labor according to the designs of people with property in order to access resources to live. Property owners *interfere* with what would otherwise be free interactions with the environment.

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If poverty is an effect of property regimes, social access to resources, and the ability to command the labor of others (or being subject to the commands of others), we’d expect to see the opposite—the absence of poverty—in societies with common property regimes.

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And indeed, this is exactly what we find. Marshal Sahlins called hunter-gatherers the “original affluent society” because, having few wants and unlimited natural means, unimpeded by private property claims, they lived largely without what we or they would consider “toil.”

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Not every hunter-gatherer lived like this, but many did or do: with extensive leisure time & less labor than we have; with labor experienced more as play than toil; with extensive sharing and little to no *work* in the sense of laboring for someone else to access resources.

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As we see, poverty is not “natural” in any meaningful sense, and our earliest ancestors likely enjoyed many amenities that all but the richest of the rich today can’t afford—not because the resources aren’t there, but because property interferes with access.

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I’ve noted elsewhere that mass starvation in the presence of abundant food, homelessness in the presence of abundant housing, etc, are unique to capitalism. This is what I mean: poverty, sometimes to the point of death, not because the resources aren’t there...

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...but because we’ve constructed our society to allocate abundant resources, overflowing resources, only to the people who can afford to access them and not to the people who need them.

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But more than just an issue of access to material abundance, modern poverty is a function of *being subject to the commands of others.* If you want to eat, build a home, etc, you cannot simply gather food or collect the materials to build a home.

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Instead, you must purchase access from people who do “own” those resources, and the manner in which the vast majority of us earn the ability to purchase is through laboring on behalf, and according to the designs, of other property owners.

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Poverty is the state of being obligated to labor on behalf of others, directly as employees or indirectly as customers, in order to access the means of life itself, the resources you’d otherwise be free to use yourself.

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Was poverty, then, natural? Our initial “state of nature”? No, far from it. Poverty is a social relationship and, like all social relationships, we could reconstruct it however we’d like.

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PS 1/

As an addendum, I offer you a strong example of *not getting it.* “Free” in this case does not mean “at no cost to anyone in any way whatsoever,” because that would be fantastical. It means *at no transactional cost.* https://twitter.com/p0w32/status/1391459165667794950

PS 2/

Setting aside the absurd idea that hunter gatherers who survived and thrived in complex, dynamic environments “didn’t have education,” we see a complete but commonplace misunderstanding of poverty as deprivation.

PS 3/

But poverty is not deprivation, it’s a social relationship. The more labor you have to perform to access basic resources, and the less access you have because of other people’s property rights interfering with your access, the poorer you are.

PS 4/

If you are free to labor for yourself, as you see fit, you’re not poor. If you don’t command the labor of anyone else, you’re not wealthy either. It’s possible to be neither rich nor poor, the true “natural state” of humanity.

PS 5/

Our correspondent here takes offense at the idea of doing things *by one’s own labor,* which is sort of like thinking you’re poor because you hosted friends for a dinner party *and did the cooking by your own labor.*