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.

Indigence becomes an indispensable element in the State. In it is concealed the secret but also the real life of a society. The poor constitute the basis and the glory of nations. And their poverty, which cannot be suppressed, must be exalted and revered

The Poor are the necessary agents of these great powers which establish the true strength of a People. Here is an entire moral rehabilitation of the Pauper, which designates, at a deeper level, a social and economic reintegration of his role and character. In the mercantilist economy, the Pauper, being neither producer nor consumer, had no place: idle, vagabond, unemployed, he belonged only to confinement, a measure by which he was exiled and as it were abstracted from society. With the nascent industry which needs manpower, he once again plays a part in the body of the nation

Michel Foucault

1926 - 1984