How to end poverty

For the 1983 film Mazdoor (Worker), Hasan Kamal wrote a song that captures the essence of this sentiment:

Hum mehnat-kash is duniya se jab apna hissa maangenge
Ek baagh nahin, ek khet nahin: hum saari duniya maangenge. (When we labourers demand our share of the world. Not just an orchard, not merely a field: we will demand the whole world)

Hasan Kamal, from the 1983 film Mazdoor (Worker),

Capitalism vacillates between a major contradiction: between social production and private property. Capital – namely money that thirsts to make more money endlessly – organises all the forces of production into one effectively organised social process that generates maximum profits to the owners and minimum possible wages to workers. The remarkable network of social production ties workers in one part of the world to another, brings commodities from there to here. This network promised to link people together and to allow humans to enjoy the fruits of each other’s labour. The problem, however, is that the immense productivity of capitalism stands on the foundation of private property. Capital is restless and must always seek a profit. It is through the control of the production process that capital exploits labour and draws out surplus value. Private capital controls the system of social production, and appropriates the social wealth produced, with little share to the actual producers. The control of capital over the production process prevents the flowering of the creative power of human labour; the pressure of profit, the fruit of private property, seeks to draw more and more from the workers whose own resourcefulness is stifled by the demands of routine, obedience, and conformity enforced by the social relations of production. Poverty is not an unfortunate manifestation of this system, but its necessary product. To eradicate poverty – which is a shared human dream – requires us to do more than seek welfare and charity. Charity and welfare might lighten the suffering, but they cannot do more than that. The producing class needed to be organised to overthrow the system of private property and to found a system based on socialist principles.

The capitalist system has lurched from crisis to crisis, unable to face its deeply rooted contradictions and unable to offer solutions to endemic social problems. Marxism remains an essential framework to analyse the system. Capitalism has no doubt changed in many different ways, developed a greater role for finance for instance; but it remains governed by the system of social production and private gain, by capital’s immense power over the system of production and accumulation. Harsh conditions of work and life, the fight over labour time and intensity, the pressures of unemployment and hunger illuminate the centrality of class exploitation in our social order. The political fight must be waged by the workers not for this or that reform alone but for the transformation of a system that continues to generate poverty. The capitalist system, by its nature, produces diabolical levels of poverty; the future does not seem possible within the system. Socialism is the great hope that we can go beyond a system that immiserates billions of people.

Adapted from here

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/09/not-just-an-orchard-not-merely-a-field-we-demand-the-whole-world/