Global poverty indicates class war, involving us
Aaron Kreider
Think, Question, Resist
The largest form of collective violence in our world is not war or crime. Imagine a violence that takes 20 to 40 years out of the lives of over a billion people.
Imagine the violence of being forced to work 10 hours a day, every day, for wages that are inadequate to feed your family or provide decent housing.
Imagine the violence of not being able to attend grade school or high school.
Imagine your brothers and sisters dying from easily curable diseases. Try changing things and you might never be seen again.
Imagine being poor.
Out of our world's population of over six billion, there are several hundred million people who will never need to face this violence. If they work long hours, it is for wages one hundred times larger than those of the world's poor are.
They can expect to live 80 years and enjoy a luxurious retirement. If they are worried about education, it is whether they will get into a prestigious private university. If sick, they are assured of being treated at public or private expense.
Their place in the world is secure from the threats of the poor due to their hegemonic military and economic power. While in the United States they may only feel like middle or upper-middle class, they belong to the global rich.
There are several billion people in our world who are very poor and several hundred million who are very rich. The rich own or benefit from multinational corporations that are extracting primary resources (fruit, coffee, metals or oil) from the Third World at fire-sale prices and exploiting its unskilled labor in sweatshops. While the prices of primary resources trail behind inflation, the rich sell Third World manufacturing goods at greatly increasing prices.
The Third World is stuck in a position of under-development, told to focus its energies on industries that are not growing while the rich nations specialize in the most profitable and technologically advanced sectors of production.
I have a confession to make: I am one of the rich. I am living off the sweat, sickness and ultimately the blood of the poor. My parents put me through a private college and now as a graduate student my free tuition plus stipend scholarship is the product of Notre Dame's vast wealth being used to attract graduate students to a forsaken corner in Northern Indiana.
Our school's wealth would not exist if capitalism had not concentrated money in the hands of a few, who then donated it by the millions in exchange for getting buildings in their name.
But this confession is not for me alone to make. For you too are members of the global rich. Not by anything you did of merit, only by the fate that you were born to rich parents instead of to poor.
So together we are rich. Perhaps your conscience is assuaged by the idea that international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are working to end global poverty.
Unfortunately, that is a lie. More people than ever live in poverty. The countries who are following the capitalist policies of the World Bank and IMF are destroying their social programs, smashing unions and lowering environmental standards to set up an inviting climate for multinational corporations to come and exploit their workers.
As the Third World goes deeper into debt and lurches from one financial crisis to another, stock markets in the rich nations soar. It is clear that those who profit from this capitalist "economic development" are the same rich nations that fund and control international agencies like the World Bank and the IMF.
What do you call a form of collective violence where rich people live in luxury, poor people are exploited and there is a direct connection between these two facts?
I call it class war.
It is a cleverly disguised war as our parents, schools, media and churches socialize us to believe that capitalism is the best economic system. Any country that attempts an alternative form of development is denied international loans and foreign investment and risks a financial crisis.
In previous years, the United States used a country's generals to overthrow nations seeking an alternative to enforced poverty, but now economic pressure and covert or overt support for conservative parties is usually sufficient.
Like most wars, there are casualties on both sides. If we continue our consumption-fueled environmental holocaust, one day even the rich will not be able to escape its consequences.
As we put profit before everything, our families, communities, personal relationships, culture and spirituality are being corrupted by greed. Class war erupts into real wars and people die on the battlefields.
As active participants in the greatest form of evil in our times what must we do? We must repent, and sin no more. By this, I mean that we must use every ounce of our class privilege to destroy all forms of privilege.
We must work for justice and never be satisfied until there are no longer rich or poor. Our idleness is only support for exploitation. There is a class war going on and hundreds of millions are dying. Which side are you on?
Aaron Kreider is a third year sociology graduate student. His column appears every other Monday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, April 2, 2001
