8.7.25

The New Division


Poverty was to be suppressed by removing and maintaining by charity a poor population. Actually, it was poverty that was being artificially masked; and a part of the population was being really suppressed, wealth being always constant. Was the intention to help the poor escape their provisional indigence? They were kept from doing so: the labor market was limited, which was all the more dangerous in that this was precisely a period of crisis. On the contrary, the high cost of products should have been palliated by a cheap labor force, their scarcity being compensated by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy: to restore this entire population to the circuit of production, in order to distribute it to the points where the labor force was rarest. To utilize the poor, vagabonds, exiles, and emigres of all kinds, was one of the secrets of wealth, in the competition among nations.

Michel Foucault
1926 - 1984