If you look at poverty rates within countries, it has indeed gone down in the BRICS, to the degree that they've resisted the corporatisation ("structural adjustment) of their societies. But in Global North countries, including US, UK and NZ, poverty has massively increased since the 1980s, along with inequality.
So average poverty across the world has reduced *despite* the metastaticising tumour of "free market" capitalism, not because of it.
(3/?)
The counterspin to this is to point to average reductions in poverty across the world. But this is best explained *not* by global wealth increasing, or being shared. But by a smaller transfer of wealth from unionised labour in the Global North to the working poor in *some* parts of the Global South.
Mostly in countries with enough geopolitical heft to engage with globalisation in ways that benefit their economics. Notably Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, ie the BRICS.
(2/?)
If you look at poverty rates within countries, it has indeed gone down in the BRICS, to the degree that they've resisted the corporatisation ("structural adjustment) of their societies. But in Global North countries, including US, UK and NZ, poverty has massively increased since the 1980s, along with inequality.
So average poverty across the world has reduced *despite* the metastaticising tumour of "free market" capitalism, not because of it.
(3/?)
The reputation laundering for corporatism deflects blame away from the 1% - the main beneficiaries of these massive poverty increases - by pointing working people at immigrants. Winston First's stoking of anti-immigrant sentiment is a classic example.
What WF and its supporters ignore is that capitalists can and do move jobs to the countries immigrants come from. Just as easily as they can increase the numbers of workers coming into the country. Immigration is a *distraction*.
(4/?)
The only way to end poverty is to dismantle the maze of political-economic systems that continuously take wealth from everyone else to enrich the 1%. Then start moving wealth back to working people, and the social and environmental commons we depend on.
The only way we can do that is for the 99% to stop playing into the divide and rule strategies of Winston and his ilk, and work together. I really like the way Zack Polanski puts this in a recent UK Greens video;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF_a_w7Dozo
(5/5)
