I thought this bit was interesting: On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists and which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements.
What are these elementary requirements and aren't they now satisfied?
This would be the elementary requirements. So is that the case, can a janitor who has been living and working in San Francisco for the past decade afford to buy food, pay rent, or (depending if reproduction of labor is included) have two kids? These people certainly exist. I suppose the people in the news stories who were just getting by in the Bay Area and are now living in their cars or whatever would be another example. And so forth. You could find other types of cases in Bangladesh, Honduras etc., which might be different in some ways.
Food, water, housing, clothing, healthcare, education. The list is long, but basic. I'm sure you can come up with the rest.
> and aren't they now satisfied?
Not for the vast majority of people living in the vast majority of countries. Even in your own, I'm sure imperialist country, huge masses of the population are in want.
We have running, clean water in every part of the country, I've never heard of any problems relating to people going thirsty or becoming ill from the supply.
Likewise with food, I haven't heard of anyone actually starving, and while you could conceivably run out of money to buy food, there's a safety net of food banks.
Clothing is very cheap - for a day's wages you could buy enough clothes to last years.
Education is provided for everyone to a level beyond what is necessary for most jobs, and that's before you consider the subsidised further education and of course the vast reams of learning material available for free on the internet (access to which is provided in public libraries).
Healthcare is also provided for everyone via the NHS. You can of course get better education and healthcare through private means, but most people don't bother even if they can afford it (unless they can easily afford it).
Which leaves just housing - only 0.1% of the people literally do not have a place to stay, and local authorities are obliged to provide accommodation for those people if they apply. There are also large private charities to address this issue.
So, is there more stuff we should add to the list that would make it more obvious how huge masses of the population are in want?
And this is where we come to the fact that poverty has been, to some extent, exported beyond the borders of your country. In the modern world you can't just stop the economic analysis at your border, millions (if not billions) of people around the world take part in your economy and many of them are starving or malnurished and probably don't have access to health care or a decent education.
If their cheap labour weren't present, you wouldn't be able to buy a year's supply of clothing for a day's wages.
Capitalism is exceptionally good at improving production, to the point where it will eventually put people out of work, and throw a growing number people back into poverty, and that is when a society is ready for a socialist revolution:
When all basic wants can be met, but no longer are solely for the reason of distribution rather than production.
In The German Ideology (1845), Marx warned that an attempt at a socialist revolution in a society that is not sufficiently advanced was doomed to failure as it would just make want common, and class differences would re-assert themselves. No points for recognising the long string of examples where this actually happened.
Every other part of Marxist theory pretty much serves to underpin or expand on that core.
You seem to be dismissing it on the basis of the fact that you simply haven't heard about the problem, which is partly because there is no official monitoring, and the current government like to claim that it doesn't exist.
The red cross apparently stepped in last year to try to help: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exclusive-red...
If you want to know more, check out some of the charitable campaigns:
Consider again the views of Robin Aitken of the Oxford Food Bank, a former BBC journalist who now collects unsold fresh food from supermarkets and distributes them to charities in Oxford. He says: ‘Some people like to believe that there has been this enormous upsurge in food poverty. My point is that there have always been poor people in this country. You could have gone back ten, 20, 50 years and there would be people who don’t get enough food. ‘The fact is that food banks are a new phenomenon. Now we have got up to 500. If you provide a service, people use it.’ Significantly, he believes that people suffered greater hardship in the recessions of the Seventies and Eighties than today, when food banks didn’t exist.
On a sliding scale: Mentally ill? Illegal immigrants without jobs? Drug users? Unemployed? Retired?
A related question for ending up homeless?
(Not English, just curious about the safety net there. Not trying to argue about anything, please. :-) )
While there's doubtless more information available on the internet these days, I just want to drop in this reminder that there is also learning material in the books housed in most of those libraries.
Local authorities absolutely do not have to provide accommodation for those who apply. Accommodation is provided to people in priority groups.
Even people who have no home and who are living on the streets (which as you say is rare in the context of homelessness) could find themselves excluded by rules for local authority accommodation.
And for the people who do meet the rules there are huge waiting lists. Tower Hamlets has a population of about 250,000 people, with about 24,000 people on the list.
Some of these people are homeless but not rough sleepers.
Note that it is possible to be sleeping rough and not meet the criteria for acceptance to the LA housing waiting list.
I've definitely heard of people becoming ill from the supply of water in the UK. The story of the map that showed cholera to be water borne (not airborne as previously believed) is a fascinating anecdote in the history of epidemiology. Of course, that was in 1854, so not terribly relevant to current conditions (I hope!)...