Is Poverty Necessary?

Poverty is defined as “the condition of having little money and few material possessions” by Wikipedia. Poverty is living with very little resources and under very bad circumstances. So, no! Poverty is not necessary, people don’t have to starve to death for a capitalist system to work but there has to be different social classes. Therefore, saying that lower class is necessary will be more appropriate in this case.

There are 3 types of rights and they are civil, political and social rights. All of these rights are there to protect the weak. They developed as the time passed by because poverty became more and more common. People needed to be protected. Therefore, to maintain the equality of citizenship, rights are given to the ones that need it. We live in a world where the system is based on capitalism. Capitalism is a systems based on social classes. Therefore I believe that lower social class is necessary. I agree with Marshall when he compares the lower social class to the foundation of a building. This is very true because the people who keep the factories working and the streets clean are people from the lower class. Germany is a very good example for this topic. Germany has overall a very old population and everyone is educated and work in upper class jobs. So they find it hard to find people who will do the dirty jobs of cleaning the toilets and cleaning the streets. People from poorer parts of Turkey migrate to Germany because in Germany they pay a lot more money to do these jobs than they do in Turkey. So they move there and send money to the family whom they leave behind and in some cases they take their family with them and live a better life than they did in Turkey. In this system that we live in, there are social classes. And as Marshall said in his article, “inequality of social class system may be acceptable provided the equality of citizenship is recognized” Moreover social class is a part of this system, therefore it is necessary. The social difference allows people to work harder to get somewhere. It allows them to have an aim in life and this, in the long run, is very good for the development of the society. “The more you look on wealth as a conclusive proof of merit, the more you incline to regard poverty as evidence of failure” rightfully says Marshall.

In conclusion, there cannot be white unless there is black. There has to poorer people to have wealthy people. When we look at the society as a whole, we can say that one can’t have something unless the other one doesn’t have it. This doesn’t mean that capitalism is a very correct and fair system; it just means that in a capitalist society social differences are necessary. It is very wrong to say that poverty is necessary. Nobody has to die because of some disease of lack of food for capitalism to work .