Only People Make Their Own History. Samir Amin

America.

      In the centres, the popular classes benefited, during the postwar period, from an exceptional situation based on the historic compromise imposed on capital by the working classes. This compromise permitted the stabilization of the majority of workers in forms of a work organization known as the ‘Fordist’ factory system. In the peripheries, the proportion of the precarious—which was, as always, larger than in the centres—did not exceed half of the urban popular classes (versus more than 70 per cent today). The other half still consisted, in part, of stabilized wage-earners in the forms of the new colonial economy and of the modernized society and, in part, in old forms of craft industries.

      The main social transformation that characterizes the second half of the twentieth century can be summarized in a single statistic: the proportion of the precarious popular classes rose from less than one-quarter to more than one-half of the global urban population, and this phenomenon of pauperization has reappeared on a significant scale in the developed centres themselves. This destabilized urban population has increased in a half-century from less than a quarter of a billion to more than a billion-and-a-half individuals, registering a growth rate which surpasses those that characterize economic expansion, population growth, or the process of urbanization itself.

      Pauperization—there is no better term to name the evolutionary trend during the second half of the twentieth century.

      Overall, the fact in itself is recognized and reaffirmed in the new dominant language: ‘reducing poverty’ has become a recurring theme of the objectives which government policies claim to achieve. But the poverty in question is only presented as an empirically measured fact, either very crudely by income distribution (poverty lines) or a little less crudely by composite indices (such as the human development indices proposed by the United Nations Development Program), without ever raising the question of the logics and mechanisms which generate this poverty.

      Our presentation of these same facts goes further because it allows us precisely to begin explaining the phenomenon and its evolution. Middle strata, stabilized popular strata, and precarious popular strata are all integrated into the same system of social production, but they fulfil distinct functions within it. Some are indeed excluded from the benefits of prosperity. The excluded are very much a part of the system and are not marginalized in the sense of not being integrated—functionally—into the system.

      Pauperization is a modern phenomenon which is not at all reducible to a lack of sufficient income for survival. It is really the modernization of poverty and has devastating effects in all dimensions of social life. Emigrants from the countryside were relatively well integrated into the stabilized popular classes during the golden age (1945–1975)—they tended to become factory workers. Now those who have recently arrived and their children are situated on the margins of the main productive systems, creating favourable conditions for the substitution of community solidarities for class consciousness. Meanwhile, women are even more victimized by economic precariousness than are men, resulting in deterioration of their material and social conditions. And if feminist movements have without doubt achieved important advances in the realm of ideas and behaviour, the beneficiaries of these gains are almost exclusively middle-class women, certainly not those of the pauperized popular classes. As for democracy, its credibility—and therefore its legitimacy—is sapped by its inability to curb the degradation of conditions of a growing fraction of the popular classes.

      Pauperization is a phenomenon inseparable from polarization on a world scale—an inherent product of the expansion of really-existing capitalism, which for this reason we must call imperialist by nature.

      Pauperization in the urban popular classes is closely linked to the developments which victimize third world peasant societies. The submission of these societies to the demands of capitalist market expansion supports new forms of social polarization which exclude a growing proportion of farmers from access to use of the land. These peasants who have been impoverished or become landless feed—even more than population growth—the migration to the shantytowns. Yet all these phenomena are destined to get worse as long as liberal dogmas are not challenged, and no corrective policy within this liberal framework can check their spread.

      Pauperization calls into question both economic theory and the strategies of social struggles.