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Victoria Lawson (editor) et al - Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles, and Possibilities

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Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles, and Possibilities
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Victoria Lawson editor et al
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The University of Georgia Press
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Year:
2018
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This collection examines the power and transformative potential of movements that fight against poverty and inequality. Broadly, poverty politics are struggles to define who is poor, what it means to be poor, what actions might be taken, and who should act. These movements shape the sociocultural and political economic structures that constitute poverty and privilege as material and social relations. Editors Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood focus on the politics of insurgent movements against poverty and inequality in seven countries (Argentina, India, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States).

The contributors explore theory and practice in alliance politics, resistance movements, the militarized repression of justice movements, global counterpublics, and political theater. These movements reflect the diversity of poverty politics and the relations between bureaucracies and antipoverty movements. They discuss work done by mass and other types of mobilizations across multiple scales; forms of creative and political alliance across axes of difference; expressions and exercises of agency by people named as poor; and the kinds of rights and other claims that are made in different spaces and places.

Relational Poverty Politics advocates for poverty knowledge grounded in relational perspectives that highlight the adversarial relationship of poverty to privilege, as well as the possibility for alliances across different groups. It incorporates current research in the field and demonstrates how relational poverty knowledge is best seen as a model for understanding how theory is derivative of action as much as the other way around. The book lays a foundation for realistic change that can directly attack poverty at its roots.

Contributors: Antonadia Borges, Dia Da Costa, Sarah Elwood, David Boarder Giles, Jim Glassman, Victoria Lawson, Felipe Magalhaes, Jeff Maskovsky, Richa Nagar, Genevieve Negron-Gonzales, LaShawnDa Pittman, Frances Fox Piven, Preeti Sampat, Thomas Swerts, and Junjia Ye.

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Relational Poverty Politics

GEOGRAPHIES OF JUSTICE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

SERIES EDITORS

Nik Heynen, University of Georgia

Mathew Coleman, Ohio State University

Sapana Doshi, University of Arizona

ADVISORY BOARD

Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto

Zeynep Gambetti, Boazii University

Geoff Mann, Simon Fraser University

James McCarthy, Clark University

Beverly Mullings, Queens University

Harvey Neo, National University of Singapore

Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles

Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, CUNY Graduate Center

Jamie Winders, Syracuse University

Melissa W. Wright, Pennsylvania State University

Brenda S. A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore

Relational Poverty Politics

FORMS, STRUGGLES, AND POSSIBILITIES

EDITED BY

VICTORIA LAWSON
AND SARAH ELWOOD

2018 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

Set in 10/12.5 Minion Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, GA

Most University of Georgia Press titles are

available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lawson, Victoria A., editor. | Elwood, Sarah, editor.

Title: Relational poverty politics : forms, struggles, and possibilities / edited by Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2018. | Series: Geographies of justice and social transformation ; 39 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017048365| ISBN 9780820353135 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820353142 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820353128 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: PovertyGovernment policy. | Poverty.

Classification: LCC HC79.P6 R45 2018 | DDC 362.5/561dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048365

For Frances Fox Piven,
who continues to inspire and teach us,
and for Vickys brother Richard.

CONTENTS

FRANCES FOX PIVEN

SARAH ELWOOD AND VICTORIA LAWSON

LASHAWNDA PITTMAN

JUNJIA YE

GENEVIEVE NEGRN-GONZALES

JEFF MASKOVSKY

PREETI SAMPAT

DAVID BOARDER GILES

JIM GLASSMAN

FELIPE MAGALHES

THOMAS SWERTS

ANTONDIA BORGES

DIA DA COSTA AND RICHA NAGAR

VICTORIA LAWSON AND SARAH ELWOOD

FOREWORD

FRANCES FOX PIVEN

The concept of relational poverty implies a theory or theories about causality. In contrast to prevalent understandings that root economic hardship in the deficits of individuals or families or subcultures, the theory asserts that poverty is best explained by patterns of human relationships, and by the social institutions that organize those relationships. And in contrast to understandings that ascribe hardship to the consequences of social exclusion or isolation, it asserts that poverty is importantly the result of the different terms and conditions on which people are included in social life.

To state this idea baldly is immediately illuminating because it directs our attention to the patterns of social relationship in which some people dominate and even crush others in order to dispossess or expropriate the life-giving resources that these people would otherwise control, whether through enclosure of the commons, or the imposition of confiscatory taxes, or by foreclosing on their farms or homes. It also directs our attention to exploitation, to the many ways that some people extract profit from the labor of others, whether through slavery or debt peonage or forced labor or wage labor. Then there are also the multiple relations with kin, community, church, and party that most of the time reinforce the relations of domination that underlie poverty, whether by invoking theories of Gods will or by drawing on attachments to family, tribe, or community or by invoking the authority of tradition. These processes lead to what the contributors to this volume rightly call differential inclusion. (Although I should note that under some conditions these multiple relations can also become the nodes that encourage defiance, as when a dissident church legitimates discontent from below, or when insurgency among one group encourages uprisings among other similarly situated people.)

To be sure, the view that the reasons for poverty are in individual or family or community traits is not totally wrong. There are of course instances where individual or family circumstances do partially explain poverty, but even then the social institutions in which people are embedded matter greatly. Whether these are kinship networks or social welfare programs, they can work to help sustain those without the capacities to function on the prevailing terms, although they can also extract in exchange terrible costs in social degradation. Similarly, while remote villages in barren climes may indeed be physically isolated, there are in fact fewer and fewer places that are so remote that they are beyond the influence of worldwide capitalism, and now, in the age of the Anthropocene, even isolated settlements are increasingly at the mercy of climate change set in motion by capitalist practices and relations. However indirectly, even the hardship produced by the droughts and floods brought on by global warming can also be understood in the framework of relational poverty.

To posit that most of the worlds poverty has to be understood in relational terms is, I think, a very promising perspective because it opens up large possibilities for change. For one thing, unlike climatic conditions or genetic disposition or family dysfunctions, social relations are malleable, and indeed they do change and change continuously, and it is people who change them. By contrast, diagnoses that attribute poverty to the nature or nurture of those afflicted, while they lead to all sorts of individual, family, and community therapeutic interventions, and also support the professionals who implement them, have generally uncertain effects on poverty. (Direct provision of resources is another matter. There is no gainsaying that the straightforward provision of cash or food or shelter, can ease poverty!)

More important, once attention is directed to the social interactions that lead to dispossession or exploitation, and then to poverty, this way of understanding poverty opens the possibility that the poor themselves can become actors in the chain of events that can produce some relief of hardship. The idea of relational poverty directs us to attend to the potential power of the poor themselves. This is a big claim, and I have to explain.

We usually think of power as the ability of one actor or group of actors to dominate others as a result of the resources they bring to bear in social interactions. This Weberian idea has led analysts to develop lists of power resources that can be used to sway people in social interaction, from personal attributes to wealth, weapons, and positions of authority in major institutions. This view is handy enough because much of the time it explains what we regularly observe, that the rich and well-placed are on top, and the poor and degraded are on the bottom of social hierarchies. Power resources are fungible, and those who have riches also can buy armies, and armies in turn can be deployed to increase stores of riches. Although much of our experience fits this model, some of it doesnt.

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