We are witnessing a very curious phenomenon in our late post-modernism: while we are constantly denouncing multiple forms of discrimination, whether based on sex, religion, color, age or appearance, our era tends to forget (or should we say, tries to make people forget) the central discrimination that characterizes the present social organization, that which targets the poor. It’s as if this subject, which conditions the material and existential realities of so many people, had become taboo and decidedly too disturbing to tackle.
There’s a lot of talk about diversity and the respect due to it, but being poor, being born poor and most of the time having to remain poor doesn’t seem to provoke any respect; being poor in capitalist society is the supreme sin and seems to be the unforgivable fault. The great advantage of financial discrimination is that it can be carried out without having to designate anyone, naturally if you like: the growing inequalities that allow it to take place, logically produce its effects. If you don’t have money, you’ll be forced to live in the most degraded and unattractive areas, you’ll be forced to eat ersatz food produced by industry, and your health will naturally pay the price.
You’ll go on vacation where it’s cheap and brief, or you won’t go at all.
Your children, whatever their geographical origins or future sexual orientation, will bear the full brunt of the poverty of this material and psychological environment, and, with rare exceptions, will see their destiny mapped out in this way. As the poor are those who have to fill the most exhausting and least rewarding jobs, they are also those who have the least leisure time to devote to what we call culture. A phenomenon which contributes to, and even facilitates, the contempt and indifference in which those responsible for and benefiting from this system hold the underprivileged.
This is a whole range of diversities that the poor would certainly prefer to do without.
The problem is that these discriminations no longer seem to interest anyone in the political or media fields, who prefer to focus their attention elsewhere.
After all, the capitalist world in which they all participate to varying degrees no longer even pretends to want to resolve the issue in any way. On the contrary, money has become the convenient tool of distancing, the means by which the poor can be kept at a distance and thus continue to be ignored.
The poor are poor, and more and more of them will have to put up with this situation – but it’s an inevitability we have to live with, and those who claim to challenge this order of things will be portrayed as dreadful agitators seeking to undermine it.
But what kind of order is satisfied with such discrimination and its consequences?
What form of social organization is it that produces ever more misery and injustice, even destroying the conditions of life on earth, while seeking to conceal these misdeeds and abominations from the public eye through a wide variety of lures?
“But the poor have no desire to contribute to economic diversity: what they want is to reduce their contribution to it; what they want is simply to stop being poor”. (Walter Benn Michaels)
And this has nothing to do with ideology.
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
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