Poverty in the Capitalistic Legal Order

Absolute poverty, the lack of means to meet basic needs is foreign to the legal order of capitalism. Only relative poverty, which allows the reintegration in the cycle production—consume, is compatible with it. After the affirmation of individual liberties with the illuministic revolutions, the economic industrial development of nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the global financial development of the present days, the capitalistic system continues to postulate that the participation in the economic and social life through the exercise of one’s own individual rights anyhow increases the common wealth and that against the present dramatic increase of disequalities and the fall of the large population groups in absolute poverty, financial concessions for keeping firms and consumers in the production cycle can be a sufficient remedy. Such means, envisaged to overcome relative poverty situations, have in fact revealed not to be enough against absolute poverty. It is therefore needed a re-thinking of ends and means of the economic system and of its legal order so that measures may be introduced (as revenu de solidarieté active, minimum wage, access to social services or public intervention programs) in such a way that the question of disequalities and of the fall in absolute poverty be not felt to be foreign to it, but placed at its centre.