The ruling classes and their allies in various spheres of life—from half-baked intellectuals in universities and think tanks to yellow journalists in the media—openly loathe welfare budgets that exist for the mere survival of poor people across the world. The poor are routinely described as lazy and "work-shy."
The welfare state, social security, and welfare budgets are blamed for making the poor lazier. Around poverty, powerful stigmas have been constructed, as though the condition of being poor were created by poor people themselves rather than by the economic and political systems that govern them. This narrative is not neutral. It is a deliberate strategy of shifting blame downward and protecting privilege upward.
The labels vary from country to country, but their function is the same. In Britain, one hears of "welfare scroungers," Benefits Street, and Hardest Grafter. In the United States, poverty is often turned into "poverty chic." In India, the poor are dismissed as a "subsidy burden." These are different expressions of a single global project: to label, stigmatise, and demonise poor people. Through such framing, poverty is not treated as a structural or policy failure but as a personal moral failing.
The media, in particular, turns the lives of the poor into spectacle, producing what can be called the "pornography of poverty"—a form of storytelling that invites contempt rather than compassion. It promotes stereotypes rather than structural change to eradicate poverty.
This campaign is systematic and well-coordinated. Its purpose is to undermine poor people not only in society but also in their own eyes. When people internalise the stigma imposed on them, they become easier to domesticate and control. The logic is simple: if poverty is caused by personal failure—by a lack of talent, skill, or morality—then the poor deserve their fate, and the rich deserve their wealth.
Such a narrative normalises poverty and naturalises the conditions that produce it. This blaming of the poor distracts attention from the real sources of inequality and suffering. It turns political and economic questions into judgments of individual morality and responsibility.
The reality is very different. Poor people face an existential crisis even as they work long hours, day and night. Study after study shows that working people often work long hours and live shorter lives. So what did the poor do wrong? What is their mistake? The conditions of poverty, unemployment, instability, homelessness, the climate crisis, jobless economic growth, and underdevelopment were not created by the poor. Poor people did not start the unending wars and unnecessary conflicts. They did not pollute the air, water, and earth. They did not create the conditions that breed debt, discrimination, inequality, and exploitation.
Yet they are trapped in these conditions without having created them.
The contradictions are glaring. The world appears to be defined by poverty amidst plenty and prosperity. The very people who build hospitals and schools suffer from illness and illiteracy without access to the hospitals and schools they built with their own labour. Those who construct roads and communication infrastructure often cannot use those facilities. Those who beautify the city live in slums.
Those who build skyscrapers suffer homelessness and live in deprived neighbourhoods. The vulnerable people who vote to build a democratic government are denied its democratic dividends. In each case, the poor are asked to build, serve, and sustain a society that refuses to include them in the economic growth story of the ruling classes.
This contradiction extends to war and citizenship. Poor people are patriots. They fight for their country as frontline soldiers in every war. They are the first to be sent to the front, the most likely to die, and the least likely to be remembered. They bear the physical and psychological wounds of conflict long after the flags have been folded.
Yet the poor are not shareholders of the state and government. They do not own the institutions they defend; they do not control the decisions that send them to war; they do not reap the dividends of the economies they protect. They are asked to sacrifice everything for a country that denies them decent housing, healthcare, education, and the political power and citizenship rights that make for a decent living. In this sense, patriotism is demanded from the poor while its rewards are reserved for the wealthy. The poor die for the state, but the state does not belong to them.
In the end, the flag they carry in the name of nationalism betrays them. Nationalism promises belonging, dignity, and protection, but for the poor it often delivers death, debt, and neglect. The flag is waved to send them to war, to justify austerity, to silence dissent, and to demand sacrifice from those who gain the least.
It shelters the powerful, the tax evaders, the corrupt, and the profiteers, while the poor are told to be grateful for the privilege of dying for a country that will not let them live in it with dignity. The betrayal is not accidental. It is structural. The poor are asked to love a nation that does not love them back. Martyrdom is the only gift the poor receive—after their death.
The demonisation of the poor, therefore, is not about the reality of everyday life, nor is it grounded in facts about working hours. It is about power. By blaming the poor for their poverty, elites justify welfare cuts, low wages, and widening inequality and exploitation. If poverty is a personal failing, then privilege appears earned and injustice appears natural.
Blaming the poor is maiming the poor. It is a strategy for consolidating wealth in the hands of the few at the cost of the many. But poverty is not a personal failing; it is a structural condition produced and maintained by the policies, processes, and institutions of exploitation, exclusion, and indifference. It is therefore imperative to reject the stigma and name the systems, policies, and processes that create poverty—so that the cycle does not continue. The poor are not the problem. The problem is a system that exploits their labour while denying them dignity.
This fundamental betrayal is sustained by a constructed morality that chains the poor to systems of oppression. The ruling classes promote ideals of sacrifice for family, nation-state, religion, patriotic duty, culture, and tradition. These ideals appear natural and eternal, but they are manufactured to serve power. They teach the poor that their suffering is noble, that their duty is to endure, and that their reward lies in the next life or in the gratitude of their betters.
In reality, this morality binds the poor to different forms of patriarchal and racialised capitalist systems across the world. It keeps women in unpaid labour, men in exploitative work, and entire communities in debt and dependency. It justifies the theft of their creativity and the extraction of their natural resources. The poor are told to sacrifice for family, nation, and God, while the profits flow to those who own the banks, the factories, and the land.
The emancipation of the poor from the conditions of poverty is therefore also an emancipation from these self-imposed conditions—conditions shaped by the ruling classes to govern the poor, their creativity, and their natural resources. The poor must resist and reject the morality that controls their consciousness and normalises endless suffering in silence and sacrifice.
Poor people need to reclaim their own labour, their own creativity, and the natural resources on which they live and work. This is not a call for charity, for a slightly larger welfare cheque, or for a wage bargain to pay next month's bills. It is a call for ownership, control, and dignity. The poor built the world; they have the right to inherit it.
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*Academic based in UK
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