Breakdown:

1. The Current Reality of Poverty in 2024:
   • Despite advances in technology and global wealth, poverty still exists in 2024, but it’s important to understand that this is not due to a lack of resources.
   • Humanity has the means to ensure everyone’s basic needs—food, water, and housing—are met, yet many still suffer from homelessness, hunger, and lack of clean water. This is not an accident; it is a deliberate feature of the capitalist system.
2. Capitalism Thrives on Poverty:
   • Capitalists build their wealth not through their own labor but by exploiting the labor of others. The more they can drive down wages, the more profit they can extract.
   • To keep labor costs low, the capitalist system relies on making the working class desperate, ensuring that people are more willing to accept poverty wages out of fear of homelessness or starvation.
3. The Strategy of Keeping Wages Low:
   • The capitalist class has an incentive to keep the floor of poverty as extreme as possible. When the threat of poverty is severe, workers are less likely to demand higher wages or better conditions.
   • If workers had their basic needs guaranteed, like housing and healthcare, they would have more bargaining power and could refuse low-paying jobs, forcing capitalists to raise wages.
4. The Impact of Socialized Programs:
   • In a system where basic needs are met, the wealth gap between the capitalist class and the working class would shrink, which goes against the interests of capitalists who seek to maintain and expand their wealth.
   • Socialized programs that benefit the working class are often sabotaged or blocked by capitalists through lobbying and political influence. They actively work to keep these programs from succeeding in order to maintain control over the labor force.
5. Control of the Narrative:
   • Capitalists use their wealth to control the media and shape public opinion, convincing people that they don’t deserve basic needs like housing and healthcare. They promote the narrative that if everyone’s needs were met, people would become lazy and stop working.
   • In reality, the issue is not that people wouldn’t work, but that they wouldn’t want to work for exploitative wages that make capitalists richer while the working class struggles.
6. Sabotage of Social Reforms:
   • When socialized programs or reforms do pass, the capitalist class uses its wealth and power to sabotage them. This ensures that when these programs fail, they can point to their failure as evidence that socialization doesn’t work and maintain the status quo.
7. Conclusion:
   • Capitalism will never eradicate poverty because the system itself is designed to keep the working class poor. The capitalist class thrives on the exploitation of labor and uses poverty as a tool to maintain control and wealth.
   • As long as the capitalist class holds the power to manipulate the government and public narrative, they will continue to ensure that poverty persists, as it is essential to maintaining the system that benefits them.

This breakdown highlights the systemic nature of poverty under capitalism, explaining how the ruling class uses economic and political power to perpetuate poverty as a means of labor exploitation and wealth accumulation.