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the point is that these choices do not happen in a vacuum, that they are shaped by system-level features: for example in the states the education system is sharply stratified on class lines. this follows from the fact that the bulk of the funding for any given school comes from local property taxes--so a school in a given area is a direct expression of the class composition of that area. so a poor district will have less money, fewer resources, lowered expectations---and will in all likelihood also find itself confronted as a theater in which other social consequences of exclusion are played out. while it is possible for folk to escape individually the statistical fate this simple arrangement confronts them with, in the main people don't. folk who are more conservative ideologically in the states tend, for whatever reason, to prefer to ignore the systematic character of this kind of situation--they prefer to assume that the minimal number of people who manage through whatever means to escape this kind of machinery are the norm and that the vast majority of children whose futures are determined for them by the class composition of the area in which they, without having a choice in the matter, grow up find themselves in that position because they lack something. not only is this view unhinged from social reality, it functions to obscure that reality. this cannot be explained as a move in the context of description, so it has to have some therapeutic function. that therapeutic function is built into conservative ideology, is central to it, and may explain something of the appeal of that ideology.
but it also follows that this same ideology leads to a blindness relative to these system-conditions.
you see it here. the who report, when it comes down to it, presents the claim and data to back it up that poverty and reduced life expectancy are linked---but also that poverty is a relational term, so it cannot be coherently thought about in terms of income levels, but rather has to be understood as a measure of particular types and implications of exclusion--so poverty in the united states is more lethal than poverty in, say, benin. why is that? because the context which enframes poverty in the united states is simply more brutal than that of benin (which i pick more or less at random as a counter-example).
from this follows an argument that if capitalism can in any way be equated with a socio-economic machine that produces a better life for the people who live within it than other systems, it can be so equated not on the basis of any "natural" unfolding of some fictive, discrete "market" order--but because within that context a POLITICAL decision is made to redirect resources with the idea that making a more equitable society is desirable--and that left to itself, however that is understood, the economic dimension of the capitalist mode of production produces outcomes that are at cross-purposes with the idea of an equitable society.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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