Rethinking Recovery: Poverty Chains and Global Capitalism
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- Published on Tuesday, 19 July 2016 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1283 .... July 20, 2016
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Rethinking Recovery: Poverty Chains and Global Capitalism
Reorienting value generated within ‘global poverty chains’ is essential to improve the lives of an impoverished world labour force.
Benjamin Selwyn
Contemporary global capitalism is characterized by extreme wealth concentration and a rapidly expanding and largely impoverished global labour force. Mainstream institutions such as the World Bank and International Labour Organization encourage integration into global value chains as a development strategy that, they claim, will reduce poverty. In reality, employment within these chains generates new forms of worker poverty and contributes to global wealth concentration. That is why they should be labelled global poverty chains.
Global inequality has never been greater. For example, the wealth of the world's richest 62 people, who between them have more wealth than... half of the world's population, rose by 44 per cent between 2010 and 2015. Over the same period the wealth of the bottom 50 per cent of humanity fell by approximately 38 per cent.
Very large numbers, perhaps the majority, of the world's labour force is poor. In 2010 there were approximately 942 million working poor (almost 1 in 3 workers globally living on under $2 [U.S.] a day). However, these figures are a significant underestimate.