Wright E O
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53706, USA.
Int J Health Serv. 1995;25(1):85-100. doi: 10.2190/WYRM-630N-8M6V-7851.
To understand more fully the nature of poverty it must be viewed as the result, in part, of inherent features of the social system. The author describes four general approaches to explaining poverty: poverty as a result of inherent individual attributes, as the by-product of contingent individual characteristics, as a by-product of social causes, and as a result of inherent properties of the social system. He then elaborates a class exploitation analysis of poverty by explaining how economic oppression, economic exploitation, and class generate a social system in which poverty plays a crucial functional role. The general problem of poverty must be broken down into two subproblems: poverty generated inside exploitative relations (the working poor) and poverty generated by nonexploitative oppression (the underclass). A class analysis of poverty argues that significant numbers of privileged people have a strong, positive material interest in maintaining poverty. Poverty can be reduced in the United States only through popular mobilization of pressure that challenges the power of the dominant classes.
为了更全面地理解贫困的本质，必须将其部分地视为社会制度固有特征的结果。作者描述了四种解释贫困的一般方法：贫困是固有个人属性的结果、是偶然个人特征的副产品、是社会原因的副产品以及是社会制度固有属性的结果。然后，他通过解释经济压迫、经济剥削和阶级如何产生一个贫困在其中发挥关键功能作用的社会制度，阐述了对贫困的阶级剥削分析。贫困的一般问题必须分解为两个子问题：剥削关系内部产生的贫困（在职穷人）和非剥削性压迫产生的贫困（下层阶级）。对贫困的阶级分析认为，大量特权阶层的人在维持贫困方面有着强烈的、积极的物质利益。只有通过民众动员压力来挑战统治阶级的权力，美国的贫困状况才能得到缓解。
