Middle class alliances to end poverty?

Abstract

What role do ‘middle classes’ play in ending poverty, or do they, rather, perpetuate continuous impoverishment? How is poverty socially and racially constructed? What can we learn from comparative and decentred research on poverty? These and other questions are at the forefront in Victoria Lawson’s (2012) essay, which analyzes and theorizes processes and provides facts that cause and reiterate persistent poverty on a global scale. Her writing goes beyond common authoritative framings of poverty, where the poor are defined primarily in terms of lack of income or as a consequence of specific class, gender or racial relations that generate exclusion and impoverishment. Furthermore, poverty is also hegemonically explained in terms of personal inabilities, inappropriate behaviour and lack of entrepreneurial engagement, often attributed to bad governance and overall cultural disposition. These predominant views in mainstream media and in political discourse frame popular perceptions and attitudes to poverty as a measurable fact expressed in statistics, categories and benchmarks used to indicate social change and progress. The results are primarily quantitative analyses of poverty trends and achieved goals, such as expressed in the UN Millennium Development Goals. Nevertheless, do these statistics and standards really tell us about the wellbeing of individuals or communities, and do they in fact help deconstruct the structural reasons and motivations behind poverty generation and poverty maintenance? By introducing the concept of relational poverty Lawson provides the theoretical foundation for understanding persistent poverty as the result of deeply entrenched, historically developed economic and political relations (also see Mosse, 2010). The resulting social categorization reproduces and reiterates inequality and makes continuous exploitation possible. The fact that impoverished people are simultaneously excluded and dominated by the current social, economic and political system becomes the major argument in this thought-provoking essay. Lawson (2012: 5) provides a detailed critique of the conventional quantitative, authoritative approach on poverty research, which basically ‘deemphasizes structural dimensions of poverty’ and responds to these ideological and ontological limits by arguing that ‘people are poor because of powerful others’. This new spin to the debate on poverty in the work of Lawson and the Middle Class Poverty Politics Research Group focuses on the role of middle classes, and the mechanisms in place for acting in opposition to or in solidarity with the poor. Their investigation of the political potential of middle class/subaltern struggles around poverty in Argentina, Canada, South Africa, Thailand, the US and India is anchored in a comparative methodology that will help to understand the integration of communities and places into globalized processes and assist in the interpretation of resulting processes and structures that produce and maintain poverty. bs_bs_banner