Poverty: Time for a relational approach | Poverty/World Hunger |Axisoflogic.com

Soup kitchen in Athens. (Photo: Reuters)

Announcements by the World Bank, the IMF; and other neoliberal think tanks, that poverty is decreasing and the middle class increasing is just a fantasy that stems from ideologically biased research programs and conceptions of poverty.

In the past few years, international organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF and mainstream economic think tanks have announced spectacular reductions of poverty in many regions of the globe, particularly in emerging countries. Astonishingly, we are informed that the middle class is growing steadily in formerly poor countries. In Latin America –the World Bank tells us– the size of the middle class doubled in the past ten years, as personal incomes increase and poverty gets cornered. India, China, and other regions also witness similar accomplishments. All these alleged changes call for optimistic visions of the future. Better incomes will translate into social well-being, while larger middle classes will bring more solid democracies. Granted: there is a lot more to do to reduce poverty, but we are heading in the right direction.

All this, of course, is nothing but a fantasy that stems from ideologically biased research programs and conceptions of poverty. In the past decades, international organizations and think tanks have produced a subtle shift in the way we understand poverty and class differences. We used to think of both as relations: there is no poverty in itself, but only in relation to wealth; one can only be of “lower” condition by contrast to the “higher” class. Moreover, it was evident that any improvement in the lives of people of the lower classes and of poor countries was only possible as the result of changes in the economy, in taxation, in international commercial and financial flows, etc. and generally in the realm of politics. To put it in other words, resolving the situation of the poor involved reforming society, including (and especially) the world of the wealthy, by putting an end to the concentration of power and capital in fewer hands.

By comparison, today’s conventional wisdom about poverty presents it as a non-relational issue. Poverty and upward social mobility appear as mere questions of personal resources or individual levels of income, with no relation to the structural inequalities of society or to the way the economy is organized. In this view, poverty is a problem of the poor, because they are lacking something –skills, ambition, social capital–, and/or have personal shortcomings –they are lazy, criminal, brutish– and therefore make poor personal choices. In other words, the poor are personally responsible for their poverty; their condition has nothing to do with anything the wealthy and powerful have, are or do. All the State can do for the poor (if anything) is to help them overcome their own issues, by offering education, micro-credits, incentives, etc.

In this view, any given person climbs out of poverty by simply increasing his or her income. As some scholarship would have it, the end of poverty comes when people who live on $1.25 per day start making $1.50 or more. Similarly, in recent reports on the explosive growth of the middle class, people start to belong to it once they make $10 per day or more. With the issue of poverty and class structure thus presented, we are invited to celebrate the current course of the world’s economy, since, yes, surveys do show that there are more people who have incomes above those arbitrarily established lines.

However, reality does not offer reasons to celebrate. In most developed and developing countries income inequality has been growing steadily for decades; in some of them poverty –even measured as simply a matter of personal income– has also expanded. In the US, the world’s first economy, poverty hit a record high level, with 46 million Americans (that is, 15.1% of the population) living in poverty, the largest percentage since the country began measuring in 1959. One in eight Americans are today on food stamps. This situation is obviously related to the evolution of the distribution of wealth. In 1915, the richest 1% of Americans held 18% of the nation’s income, while today the figure has climbed to 24% –a level of inequality not seen since the Great Depression in 1929. The situation in some European countries is somewhat better, while others are in serious economic turmoil, with poverty reaching peaks previously unknown. In China, the locomotive of global capitalism, the high levels of economic growth have come together with an explosive increase in inequality, and the same applies to other developing countries (with the exception of Latin America, the only region in which economic growth has allowed for a relatively better distribution of income, in a continent that, however, remains the most socially unequal of the world). And it may be the case that some Chinese, British, Brazilian or American workers have better levels of income in absolute terms, but that does not mean any “upward mobility” if, at the same time, the top 1% have increased their income and wealth many times. In relative-relational terms, working people and the middle classes have not “climbed the social ladder” but rather moved downwards.

Quite expectedly, this scenario does not seem to be bringing us better democracies. On the contrary: in most regions the common citizen’s political rights –even the basic civil rights– have become weaker. In the past two decades, the US has led the way in the expansion of corporate and State power at the expense of the citizen’s most basic rights, including the right to privacy and the freedom of the press. In North America and in most of Europe financial interests control political decisions to a great extent, directly or indirectly. The lack of political rights and basic freedoms in China and in other emerging countries is a reality that few people need to be reminded of. Again in this case, some Latin American countries that managed to expand civil and social rights in the past decade or so seem to be the exception. But this exception is less related to the expansion of a “middle class” than with the fact that mass mobilizations and powerful social movements of the lower and lower-middle classes managed to acquire influence in State decisions. As a matter of fact, social struggle is the factor that helps explain why the region, unlike others, experienced economic growth while, at the same time, managed to better the distribution of income. The strength of democracy seems to me more the effect of equality and political participation from below, than the automatic outcome of higher incomes or of economic growth.

That is a lesson, however, that policy makers are not likely to accept graciously. Poverty politics has been in the hands of elites, politicians and international bureaucrats; their decisions have been oriented by mainstream economists and other conservative or liberal-minded scholars who are not particularly keen on changing the status quo. As a matter of fact, the non-relational view of poverty is aimed precisely at governing a world that accepts inequality as a natural fact. It is an ideology that lets the rich pursue their businesses as they please, while offering some hopes of future relief to the poor (an offer that only comes after having blamed them for their own situation).

While several groups of academics throughout the world are trying to counter this common sense, a recent initiative is worthy of attention. On 10thOctober hundreds of students, graduates, activists and professors gathered in Seattle to formally launch the Relational Poverty Network (RPN), an inclusive, open network of scholars, teachers and activists aimed at fostering collaborations across academic disciplines, places and types of poverty knowledge and at engaging in education, media outreach and work with community partners. The RPN was co-founded by Victoria Lawson and her colleague in the Geography department of the University of Washington, Sarah Elwood, accompanied by a Steering Committee of scholars from the US, Argentina, South Africa and the UK. It was designed as “a broad experiment bringing sciences and humanities together to build alternative understandings of impoverishment and forge social alliances to address poverty and inequality” (http://depts.washington.edu/relpov ). As Lawson and Elwood explained in their opening remarks, the aim of the RPN is non other than to create a new field of knowledge, to establish and legitimate a body of knowledge that can inform action and “offer new ideas that can reshape widely circulating cultural and political narratives about inequality and about who is poor, why they are poor, and how to act on poverty”. As Lawson also argued, the initiative is about “re-politicizing poverty”: the RPN “understands poverty as ‘overdetermined’ –as arising from a set of interlocking processes including materialist workings of capitalism around the globe and in postcolonies, cultural politics of representation, processes of racialization, gender, nationality and ability and processes of governing, norming, and of making common sense”.

Needless to say, global poverty policies will only change as a result of social struggles, lower class mass mobilization, political organizing, and strong alliances between the poor, the workers and at least part of the middle classes. But academics in the social sciences and the humanities can also contribute with better conceptual tools and critically-oriented research. The current global situation demands that the academic world rethinks poverty as a relational issue, engages in public debates and challenges the conventional wisdom (and the “experts” an authorized voices that shape it). Of course, thinking of poverty as a relation is hardly a new idea. Social movements have had that notion as a key tenet of their demands and of their understanding of the world for a long time, and there is a long tradition of critical academic thinking and research in this regard. However, there is still a long way to go. While the economic dimension of poverty as a process has received more attention, its inter-relation to other processes –such as racialization, criminalization, gendering, discrimination on basis of ability, citizenship, age and generation, etc.– still calls for better analytical tools and empirical evidence.

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