That passage argues that poverty and indebtedness can function as mechanisms of social control.

In simpler terms, it claims that:

• Keeping a group economically insecure leaves people with few alternatives.
• Financial desperation makes people more willing to accept poorly paid or undesirable work.
• The same desperation can make recruitment into organizations or causes easier.
• Therefore, the persistence of an economically disadvantaged “underclass” is presented not merely as an accidental outcome, but as something that can be useful to those with power.

The key phrase is “the purpose of keeping people…”. That is a strong claim about intent: it goes beyond saying that poverty has these effects and asserts that maintaining poverty is deliberately done for those reasons.

If you're assessing the argument, that distinction matters: “poverty can make people more vulnerable to exploitation” is an empirical claim; “poverty is deliberately maintained in order to exploit people” requires evidence about the intentions and actions of particular actors.

is there any evidence

Yes—but the evidence is stronger for the narrower claim that poverty/debt can be deliberately exploited to control labour than for the much broader claim that “the purpose of keeping an underclass poor is to control them.”

There are several well-documented examples:

• Debt bondage: The ILO documents cases where employers or recruiters deliberately create or exploit debts—through recruitment fees, advances, inflated charges, or wage deductions—to make workers unable to leave. The ILO explicitly identifies poverty as increasing vulnerability to these practices.
• Brazilian agricultural labour: An ILO investigation documented employers/recruiters using advances, inflated charges for food and accommodation, and employer-controlled stores to accumulate debts that workers could not realistically repay. The workers were predominantly poor people seeking employment.
• South Asian bonded labour: Research compiled by the ILO describes workers being recruited with advances and false promises, subsequently becoming trapped in debt-based labour relationships.
• Modern forced labour: The ILO's current estimates put forced labour at about 27.6 million people, with private actors responsible for the majority. Its research identifies illegal profits as a major driver and debt bondage as an important mechanism.

There is also historical evidence that goes beyond merely taking advantage of existing poverty. In some systems, employers had incentives and mechanisms that actively created dependency—for example, advances that became debts, employer-controlled stores, wage withholding, and restrictions on leaving. Those are concrete examples of people with power maintaining conditions that made workers dependent.

But there's an important evidentiary gap in the quotation you gave.

What the evidence does—and doesn't—show

Claim	Evidence
Poverty makes people more vulnerable to exploitation	Very strong
Debt can be deliberately used to bind workers to employers	Very strong
Employers/recruiters sometimes deliberately create or perpetuate worker dependency	Strong, documented cases
Exploitative labour can itself perpetuate poverty	Strong
Powerful groups have historically benefited from keeping particular populations economically dependent	Strong in particular historical cases
“The purpose of keeping people poor is to control them” as a general explanation of poverty	Not established by this evidence

The last distinction is important. The evidence establishes mechanisms of exploitation and deliberate dependency, but it doesn't establish that poverty in general is maintained because that is its intended purpose.

In fact, the ILO explicitly describes a two-way relationship: poverty can make people susceptible to forced labour, while forced labour can then cause or perpetuate poverty.

So if the quotation is intended as a historical/general thesis, I'd characterize it as partly grounded in documented history but considerably stronger than what the evidence by itself establishes.

If you want, I can also look specifically for historical examples where there is documentary evidence that elites/governments explicitly intended to keep a population poor or indebted in order to obtain cheap labour. That would test the strongest version of the claim.

Look specifically for historical examples where there is documentary evidence that elites/governments explicitly intended to keep a population poor or indebted in order to obtain cheap labour

Yes. Looking specifically for documentary evidence of deliberate policy, rather than merely evidence that poor people were exploited, turns up some quite strong historical cases.

The clearest example I found is South Africa's segregationist labour system, particularly from the late 19th century through apartheid.

1. South Africa: land dispossession explicitly linked to labour supply

The 1913 Natives Land Act restricted Black South Africans' ability to acquire land outside designated reserves. The reserves constituted only a small fraction of the country. The effect was to undermine independent African farming and push people toward wage labour.

This isn't just a later interpretation. Historical documentation describes the policy in terms of its labour consequences. South African History Online records that the reserves were intended to function as pools of migrant labour for white farms and urban industry, while independent tenancy outside the reserves was restricted.

A recent academic treatment in the Industrial Law Journal is even more explicit: it describes the 1913 Act as a response to demands from the white farming and mining sectors for cheap labour and says that dispossession ensured a supply of cheap labour.

And there is unusually direct contemporary evidence. In a 1912 political address discussing proposed legislation, the speaker described the policy's “sole object” as providing cheap labour for farmers, explaining that it would drive thousands of Africans off the land.

That's quite close to the proposition you're investigating:

restrict people's independent means of subsistence → make them dependent on wage employment → obtain a large supply of cheap labour.

2. South Africa: the government explicitly envisioned a cheap migrant-labour reservoir

The evidence becomes even stronger in the late 1940s.

The National Party's apartheid programme advocated maintaining Black people primarily in rural reserves while permitting temporary migration to cities for employment. Contemporary historical accounts describe this explicitly as creating a cheap labour reservoir for industry without allowing Black families to settle permanently in towns.

This is important because it demonstrates something more specific than ordinary economic exploitation. The objective wasn't simply:

“We want cheap workers.”

It involved constructing a social system in which workers couldn't readily establish an independent economic existence outside the system, while simultaneously ensuring that industry could obtain their labour.

South African History Online summarizes the consequences of the 1913 Act particularly starkly: it restricted most Black South Africans to a small portion of the land, abolished sharecropping, and forced many previously independent families either into farm labour or increasingly overcrowded reserves.

3. The mining industry provides an unusually clear paper trail

The South African gold-mining industry developed the migrant-labour system partly because mines wanted workers who could be paid relatively low wages.

By 1946, when roughly 76,000 Black miners went on strike, the Chamber of Mines explicitly defended the cheap-labour system. The subsequent Lansdowne Commission accepted the premise that a constant supply of cheap labour was necessary and that the migrant system was the mechanism for providing it.

The crucial mechanism was that miners' wages could be treated as merely a “supplementary income”, on the assumption that their families would maintain themselves through subsistence agriculture in the reserves.

But the reserves were themselves increasingly impoverished and overcrowded. The result was a circular system:

land restriction → inadequate rural livelihood → need for migrant wages → controlled migration → low wages → continued rural poverty → continued dependence on migrant labour.

That is remarkably close to the mechanism described in the quotation you originally gave.

 "The distribution of power is forever zero-sum, no matter the technology. Because power is relative and weighed against the potential and abilities of other people, there are many things that are not a zero-sum game, but power absolutely is. Some people have to be disempowered for others to have power—the capital class, government, etc. It is the ability to control other people's behavior. Poverty is a tool—it's a choice, a policy choice. We don't need to have it; we've chosen to adopt it because it's useful to specific ends."

A more empirically defensible version

If the underlying argument you're trying to make is the one I think you're making, I'd formulate it something like this:

Power is fundamentally relational: it concerns the capacity of actors to affect the behavior, choices and outcomes of other actors. Some important forms of power—particularly coercive authority, control over institutional decisions, and bargaining power over scarce resources—are inherently relational and can be zero-sum: expanding one actor's control can constrain another's. But power is not universally zero-sum, because individuals and groups can also acquire new capacities to act through cooperation, organization, institutions and technology.

Economic deprivation can function as a mechanism of power because dependence on scarce resources can constrain people's ability to refuse, negotiate or exit relationships. Poverty is therefore not merely an unavoidable natural condition: its prevalence and distribution are substantially shaped by political and economic institutions and by policy choices. This does not mean that all poverty is intentionally produced as a tool of control, but it does mean that particular forms of deprivation can be institutionally maintained and can have predictable effects on the distribution of power.

 In political theory and social critique, this dynamic usually boils down to three main mechanisms:

• Moralizing Structural Problems: Assigning individual blame for outcomes that are heavily shaped by systemic conditions (such as inherited capital, access to land, or institutional leverage). It shifts the focus from structural reform to individual character or personal resilience.

• Economic Insulation: Wealth and institutional backing act as a cushion against material risk, giving those born into advantage a vast safety net while framing similar forms of possible support for others as unearned or unproductive.

• Systemic Echo Chambers: The "regurgitation" aspect describes how cultural, media, or institutional narratives often reproduce and validate the perspective of dominant groups—transmitting elite norms down through broader social layers until they feel like common sense.

Whether framed through critical economics, sociopolitical critique, or psychological defense mechanisms, it highlights the frustration of being held to hyper-individualized standards of responsibility by those least subject to its costs.

"Everything is your fault you big baby, sayeth the elite who get free money at the start of and their lives. While their flying monkeys mindlessly regurgitate the same message. Even the victimized are prone to validating and perpetuating dominant perspectives.

The "regurgitation" aspect describes how cultural, media, or institutional narratives often reproduce and validate the perspective of dominant groups—transmitting elite norms down through broader social layers until they feel like common sense".

"The parallel tracks run so cleanly that the people designing the system and the people living under it can occupy the same land without ever seeing each other's land".

"Historically, this has always been the point of poverty and indebtedness. The purpose of keeping people sustained in an underclass is that desperation means you can drive them to do basically whatever you want. If you keep people poor and desperate, it's easy to recruit them, it's easy to get them to do menial labor—that's the whole point of it, really".

V

 The broad empirical pattern is that higher wealth/asset inequality is associated with several less favourable social outcomes, but the strength and causality of those relationships vary considerably.

Social metric	Typical relationship with higher asset/wealth inequality	Evidence / caveat
Social trust	Often negative — higher inequality is associated with lower interpersonal trust.	Reviews find a fairly consistent association, although effects depend on how inequality and trust are measured.
Social cohesion / social capital	Generally negative.	Experimental and observational literature links inequality with reduced cooperation and trust, although not every dimension of social capital moves in the same direction.
Health / mortality	Often negative, i.e. greater inequality correlates with worse health outcomes.	This is particularly contested for wealth inequality itself. A large Norwegian fixed-effects study found no increase in mortality associated with local wealth inequality.
Mental health / wellbeing	Often negative.	Reviews associate greater inequality with lower happiness and wellbeing and greater status anxiety, but causal pathways remain debated.
Educational attainment	Generally negative.	Higher inequality is associated with larger educational gaps and lower mobility, though education, family background and institutions are important confounders.
Social mobility	Generally negative.	More unequal societies tend to exhibit lower intergenerational mobility in much of the comparative literature.
Crime / violence	Often positive — higher inequality accompanies higher crime rates in many cross-sectional studies.	The relationship is not universal, and distinguishing inequality from poverty, segregation and institutional factors is difficult.
Political/institutional trust	Often negative.	Reviews report lower trust in government in more unequal societies, although institutional context matters substantially.
Poverty/deprivation	Generally positive association.	Inequality affects how effectively economic growth translates into poverty reduction; this is not the same as saying inequality necessarily causes poverty.

The important statistical distinction

A high Asset Gini can therefore show a pattern such as:

High asset inequality → lower trust, cohesion, mobility and wellbeing; higher deprivation and sometimes higher crime.

But this should initially be interpreted as correlation, not proof of causation. Wealth inequality is intertwined with income, education, housing markets, taxation, public services, demographics and historical institutions. The literature explicitly notes that some apparent country-level relationships can arise from common underlying factors rather than inequality directly causing the social outcome.