Tendency towards the mass impoverishment of the non-bourgeois layers of society, and in particular of the workers, through the increase of exploitation in absolute terms, unemployment, the general precarization of living and working conditions, and war.
Origin of pauperization
The cause of pauperization lies in the very nature of the accumulation process. When the market does not grow at the pace that capital accumulation would require, only the increase of exploitation in absolute terms offers relief to the profitability of productive capital. However, in doing so it restricts demand even further, feeding a vicious circle in which unemployment inevitably grows.
The fall in the purchasing power of wages, the reduction or disappearance of basic services, precarization and unemployment are the three main vectors of pauperization, because they are the necessary paths or accompaniments of the bourgeoisie's attempts to increase exploitation in absolute terms.
Historical development of the tendency
Under rising capitalism, pauperization appears only at the end of the economic cycle, when large masses of unemployed form, working hours lengthen and wages fall across the board. However, in each case the expansion of the world market reverses the tendency, and a new cycle of accumulation begins free of that burden.
From the entry of capitalism into its phase of historical decadence, pauperization becomes a permanent and global tendency. It is evident in war and throughout the long phase of crisis that follows the post-war reconstructions, but it is present even during reconstruction in the weakest and most peripheral countries.
It is no longer the result of a moment in the expansion of the system but of a phase in which the lack of extra-capitalist markets can no longer be overcome by a new expansion of the world market. This "confinement" of capital in a finite world that cannot absorb the whole of production with what capitalism hands over to the workers as wages triggers flights into credit, the formation of speculative fictitious capital and the falling tendency of the rate of profit. The permanent tendency to crisis is also a permanent tendency to the pauperization of the workers.