Poverty, the postmodern and the jobless future

Abstract

In the United States of America poverty remains high even in a time of relative prosperity and low unemployment. In the 1930s and 1960s when poverty was high it led to a massive poor peoples movement. In the 1990s even with increasing immiseration there currently isn't a major poor peoples movement in the United States that is struggling to create an alternative politics to the current privatization of the welfare state. In this paper I argue that there are three conditions that currently make a poor peoples movement difficult. The first is that the political representation of the postmodern is piecemeal reform and this is expressed through the last master narrative of computer-aided capitalism. The state has been hollowed out and national issues like hunger and poverty have been subordinated to the requirements of global competition. The second is the problem of advocacy, that is that the bureaucratic requirements of managing poverty organizations and especially fundraising make the theorizing necessary to create an alternative poverty politics difficult. Thirdly the thesis of the “jobless future” that both the new global organization of capital and the new technologies requires fewer workers at lower wages rendering job solutions to poverty obsolete. Only a social movement of the poor that takes the time to theorize a new poverty politics and includes radical democracy and a middle class guaranteed annual income can end the problem of poverty. Currently this is not happening.