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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? 155
available in limited quantities, that spares some people from want, is
desirable and just (it stemmed from the divine will, was the reward of
excellence or was the driving force behind social progress). The raison
d’étre of the prevailing institutional order of power was to sanction this
asymmetrical arrangement.
Since the Age of Enlightenment, however, new views in contrast
with the above, have gradually taken root in Europe. Since then, ever
more people think that poverty is an eradicable anomaly, for the
existence of which the individual or society can justly be condemned.
‘They usually hope that the liberation from poverty — which is usually
seen as part of emancipation — will result from two procedures: one is
the increased production of lacking goods; the other is the fair
distribution of produced things. These two will create the economic
conditions for the satisfaction of the basic needs, i.e., for the eradication
of poverty; all that is needed today is to want this. However, I will argue
below that neither path is tenable and I will seek to draw constructive
conclusions from this. I claim
1. that a priori no authentic description of poverty is possible within
the scope of the satisfaction of needs;
2. that the increase of production can actually exacerbate poverty
and currently is doing just this;
3. and finally, that the expectations of fair distribution are based on
the false belief that goods can be distributed in several ways within a
given social system without running into an irresolvable contradiction
with the logic of the system’s operation.
I have to support my position in opposition to the abstract
understanding of poverty in the first case, an economy-centred
understanding in the second and a socialist understanding in the third.
1. I call the approach abstract which tries to conceive of man
independently of his natural and social environment and abstracted from
the organic unity of life processes and which tries to do so, moreover,
in opposition to these. In this arrangement, the starting point is the
individual, the subject suffering from hunger or others’ contempt, on
the one hand; on the other, the thing capable of alleviating his suffering:
food, recognition, etc. “Need” thus understood and its object are,
however, far from qualities of objects existing independently of each
other: food and appetite both depend on the historically changing ways
of nourishment. This connection is even more obvious in the case of
social needs taken in the strictest sense of the word. What treatment