Poverty affects mental development

The Wired Science blog reports on a new study that links childhood poverty with impaired cognitive development. Bad news for the 1.4 billion people worldwide who live on less than $1.25 a day (according to the World Bank), not to mention the hundreds of millions of proletarians in the west who struggle to survive despite a much higher income. These lives are stunted even more so, one would suspect, by the total lack of leisure time, an education whose only aim is to make them complacent sellers of labor-power, and their inability to afford the fruits of a culture that has been totally commodified. Kropotkin captured this predicament brilliantly in his “Appeal to the Young“:

Do you remember the time, when still a mere lad, you went down one winter’s day to play in your dark court? The cold nipped your shoulders through your thin clothes, and the mud worked into your worn-out shoes. Even then when you saw chubby children richly clad pass in the distance, looking at you with an air of contempt, you knew right well that these imps, dressed up to the nines, were not the equals of yourself and your comrades, either in intelligence, common sense, or energy. But, later, when you were forced to shut yourself up in a filthy factory from five or six o’clock in the morning, to remain twelve hours on end close to a whirling machine, and, a machine yourself, were forced to follow, day after day, for whole years in succession, its movement with relentless throbbing – during all this time they, the others, were going quietly to be taught at fine schools, at academies, at the universities. And now these same children, less intelligent, but better taught than you, have become your masters, are enjoying all the pleasures of life and all the advantages of civilization. And you? What sort of lot awaits you?

You return to little, dark, damp lodgings where five or six human beings pig together within a few square feet; where your mother, sick of life, aged by care rather than years, offers you dry bread and potatoes as your only food, washed down by blackish fluid called, in irony, tea; and to distract your thoughts, you have ever the same never-ending question, “How shall I be able to pay the baker tomorrow, and the landlord the day after?”

What! Must you drag on the same weary existence as your father and mother for thirty and forty years? Must you toil your life long to procure for others all the pleasures of well-being, of knowledge, of art, and keep for yourself only the eternal anxiety as to whether you can get a bit of bread? Will you wear yourself out with toil and have in return only trouble, if not misery, when hard times – the fearful hard times – come upon you? Is this what you long for in life?

If the poor are no longer as wretched as they were when Kropotkin wrote, the rich are infinitely richer. As Marx observed, poverty is relative:

A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only slight or no demands to make, and however high it may shoot in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.

One only has to look at the educational experiences of workers’ children relative to the education of the children of the rich to see that enormous disparities remain. A man like Bill Gates become the world’s richest man only because his wealthy parents can afford to send him to a school with the latest technology, where he learned computers; whither the children of the working class, some of whom study in schools so dilapidated that rain clouds form inside of them (according to Jonathan Kozol, at least)?

All that said, as individuals, the rich are often even more stunted than the poor. They are often vicious, selfish, cynical, and paranoid — and with their privileges to guard, how could they develop otherwise? Only in a communist society, which Marx and Engels described as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” can the potential of all humanity be fully realized.