ABSTRACT
CONCLUSION TO PART II We have argued that poverty and social exclusion are created by the nexus of economic, social and state processes, in which ideologies, culture and space are constitutive elements. Capitalist labour markets and their spatiality are central to poverty creation because they do not guarantee employment and because of the enormous differentiations in the quality of jobs which they produce; these impact also on those outside the labour market. The social relations of the economy also cause poverty-level state benefits both by restricting state spending and by linking benefit levels to low wages. But people’s ability to survive on given money income is crucially dependent on the (spatial) forms of capitalist supply of goods and services, and on relations within households and neighbourhoods which organise distribution of resources, unpaid work, and reciprocal exchange. Survival also depends on state welfare services which, while they supplement money income and unpaid work, are limited in their benefits to the poor by their internalisation of class relations and social oppressions. Social reproduction both private and by the state in turn exacerbates differences in access to the labour market. Moreover, class disadvantage is compounded by, and compounds, social oppressions to produce highly differentiated forms of exclusion with their particular spatialities. All these processes are exacerbated by hostile attitudes to the poor and to poor places, attitudes which themselves have material-spatial roots. Labour markets, the private household form, their spatialities and associated ideologies continuously fragment the disadvantaged and set them against each other, making deprivation harder to cope with and to fight.
