Why are the poor poor?

The Guardian carries an interesting piece of information 

.A Eurobarometer report in 2010 examined attitudes to poverty in the European Union. The most popular explanation among Europeans (47%) for why people live in poverty was injustice in society.

But the other half of respondents opted for some other cause:

16% said people live in poverty because of laziness and lack of willpower, 16% saw poverty as an inevitable part of progress,

13% said people live in poverty because they have been unlucky. 

The article quotes George Bernard Shaw who saw the cure for poverty is an adequate income. “The crying need of the nation,” he wrote, “is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.” The solution he proposed was what he called a “universal pension for life”, or what we now call a universal basic income.

The Socialist Party disagrees. The correct answer to the question, "Why are the poor poor?" is that they are poor because the means of production and distribution are owned and controlled by the capitalist class instead of by the whole community, and consequently so is the wealth produced by the workers. The Socialist Party says that the cause of poverty and of all the evils which arise from it lies in the fact that all the means whereby you live are owned and controlled by a section of society. These people not only own the factories, offices, shops, etc. but, by virtue of this fact, own your very lives. You are slaves.  You are allowed, not to live, but merely to exist as profit-making machines. You are poor because you are robbed. You are robbed because you are slaves—hired slaves or wage slaves. You are slaves because you own nothing but your power to labour, and must, therefore, hire your labour-power to those who own the means of livelihood. These are the masters. Owning your means of life, they can lay down the terms upon which they will hire you. Their terms are, that in return for the hire of your labour-power they will give a sufficient sum to enable you to support life and reproduce your kind. This sum is called wages, and the system based upon wage labour is called capitalism.

There is no need for anyone to be poor. There is no need for anyone to be robbed. There is no need for slavery in any form.  The remedy is to dispossess that class of its ownership. The workers must revolt and it must be a conscious, intelligent revolt aimed, not at some little easing of their servitude. They must, by means of their votes, capture Parliament and proceed to reconstruct society. Instead of the product of the nation’s toil being divided among the handful of immensely rich who own the means of wealth-making, each member of the community would receive according to his or her need. The colossal waste of capitalist society; its competition; its advertising; its over-production; its under-employment; its war industry; its production of shoddy goods, and so forth, would be eliminated.