Professor Rahnema´s Poverty and Potential- 26.11.09 Helsinki working paper
POVERTY, VIEWED AS PEOPLE’S POTENTIA
It is reported that Confucius was once asked what would be the first thing he would do if he would become an Emperor. His answer was: “The most important thing would be for me to rectify the meaning of words!” As in modern times, the misuse and the manipulation of words has become a major tool for the colonization of minds, I would like to start these short comments on poverty by following the wish of the great Chinese sage.
To begin with, poverty is NOT what the modern newspeak has made of it. At the dawn of the present millennium, as the World Bank launched its most mediatized programme for eradicating poverty in the world, it thought to offer a universal and clear-cut definition for the word. Accordingly, it decided that whoever earned less than one U.S. dollar a day would be classified under the label of absolute poverty, while the condition of those able to earn at least 2 U.S dollars a day was called a relative poverty. Following that decision, the Bank declared, in the year 2002, that 57% of the world population were living in poverty.
Some twenty years before, a group of highly respected historians of poverty participating in a two-year study at the Sorbonne, proposed a totally different approach to the search for a universal definition of the concept. Their work ended up with quite a different type of statement. “Poverty is too general, too relative, too ambiguous and, especially, with too many different interpretations, to be objectively and validly defined on a universal scale.
Actually, the thousands of meanings given to the word by different cultures and languages cannot question this latter position. For even some statisticians or economists would be happier with a broad definition like the one proposed by the World Bank no type of classification could change the fact that there are as many forms of poverty as there are different forms or riches, for that matter) as there are human beings. Only a small group of poverty experts or “poverticians” (as Edward Koch, a former Mayor of New York) had called them. could deny that poverty is a human condition, and in that sense, all humans are all somehow poor and rich”. As a matter of fact, the history of the word shows well that in most languages, the poor as a noun or substantive appeared only in the beginning of the first Century, while the adjective poor had existed long before. For Ivan Illich, poverty was always “understood as a pervasive feature in the social landscape of every culture. Primarily and above all, it referred to the precarious conditions within which most people survived most of the time. Poverty was a general concept for a specific cultural interpretation of the necessity to live within very narrow limits, defined differently for each place and time.
On another plane, not all forms of poverty were always perceived as a shame or a scourge, or a “violation of human rights”, as it was presented in an official Unesco document in the year 2002. There were indeed different perceptions of that predicament as there were different types of poverty. As such, voluntary poverty represented the free choice of the most virtuous humans in every society. In all human societies, those who had freely chosen poverty were considered often as saints or holders of the highest forms of riches, what the Persian poet/philosopher called “living riches”. In another way, convivial poverty that often represented the predicament of the “common man”, had its own particular riches as it often represented a quite honourable mode of living with what was considered as the his or her modest share in the riches produced by his or her community. As a rule, convivial poverty represented a way of life particularly rich in their traditions of simplicity, frugality, sharing and hospitality. For Joseph Proudhon, that form of poverty represented “the normal condition of humankind in civilization” ( la condition normale de l’Homme en civilisation).
As long as these different categories of poor could rely on what Ivan Illich called the “cultural hammock” of their convivial poverty, they could keep off the danger of falling into destitution or misery. “And there was always the ground level to depend on, as a squatter or beggar. This side of the grave, no one could sink below ground. Hell was a real pit, but it was for those who had not shared with the poor in this life, to be suffered after death.
The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Economic Man (homo oeconomicus) did however produce an historical break in the perception of poverty. As the new economic and socially produced needs started to colonize the vernacular sense of human needs, the new poor were subjected to all kinds of moral and material pressures. They were manipulated into abandoning their own subsistence economy against the promises of a modern and more productive one that was mainly geared to create for them unreachable needs. It was under these conditions that the old “cultural hammocks” of the poor started first to loose their resilience and fitness to their own real needs. In a short time, the process acted the same way as an HIV retroactive virus pierces its way through a weakened membrane of its victim with a view to changing the genes of its prey against its own. The systemic production of what René Girard coined as “mimetic desires”, further activated the destruction of the old “cultural hammocks” and the parallel destruction of all the shields that the poor had created for their defence with a view to ultimately exorcizing their fall into destitution.
2.The crux of the matter is still that a great majority of human beings, perhaps even more the 4 billions registered by the World Bank, are today threatened by the “pitfalls” of dire destitution that are waiting to absorb them into different kinds of destitution and pauperization. For the first time in history, a most complex variety of old and new forms of destitution are being produced by modern economy that seem to take as their main target the potentia proper to every human being, that form of innate, God-given and God-like vital force that constitutes the perfect singularity of every human being. As Jacques Ellul has rightly put it, the old proletariat of which Marx was speaking may even be in the process of being absorbed by economy. Yet, new categories of modernized poor are now emerging who might even have crossed the so-called poverty lines everywhere, but whose features of alienation are not less that that of the old proletariats. He had coined these emerging classes as the proletariats of affluence.
3.It appears, thus, clearly that the problématique of poverty cannot be reduced to economic and statitistical simplifications. Neither the highly multidimensional and culture-specific aspects of poverty could make it the property of one particular income-related group. The more a poverty oriented archeologist would try to use quantitative or data-based criteria for defining poverty in general, the greater would be his or her chances of missing the essential; the greater also would be the risk of making generalisations that end up with the production of dependency producing recipes. Populist “solutions” that are then produced by “do-gooders” of all kinds, ultimately turn the poor into the destitute.
To these general, philosophical and conceptual difficulties, associated with the latest trends of poverty-therapy, one should add three others that highly complicate the issue: a) the strong desire of “do-gooders” of all kinds to propose quick solutions to their sufferings, b) the lack of sensitivity to the fact that such “solutions” act often as relief therapies that only aggravate the case of the patient, c) the illusion that what has appeared “good” and useful to their well-off doctors necessarily apply to the case of people living under totally different conditions. If most of the recipes offered “the poor”, by large aid-providing institution, including some NGOs, have often aggravated rather than improved the condition of the poor, one or a combination of these factors have had their part of responsibilities in the case.
Last but not least, a strange yet striking type of schizophrenia seems now to appear in the large “aid-providing” institutions of the world, especially in those closely associated with the capitalistic machinery. The World Bank provides us with one of the most striking examples of this type of disease, particularly during the years it was preparing its well-known world campaign for the eradication of poverty. For all these reasons, the document of the Bank, prepared by Deepa Narayan and her team, under the title Voices of the Poor; Can Anyone Hear Us ?, is on the one hand, an impressive source for knowing what poverty represents for a high percentage of the poor presently living in the world. On the other hand, it reveals that the threat of a possible explosive situation has led the Bank to display an extraordinary schizophrenic attitude.
Let us now try to mention at least some of the demands of the 40000 selected poor whom the Narayan team have interviewed. Besides some comments of a general nature, this part of my presentation will only include some of the titles chosen by the Report in its Chapter 7, entitled Conclusions: The Way Forward.
In a nutshell, what the Narayan’s team has reported to us from their interviews with their selected team of poor persons, paradoxically reflect what the staunchest critics of the Bank’s policies have hitherto addressed to it. Namely, that the huge variety of poor, as well as what their poverty means to them, can NOT be reduced to an income evaluated at one or two dollars a day. Anyone reading the Deepa Narayan report has no difficulty to find out that what she and her team want us to know has never been understood or shared by the expert “poverticians” and their friends in the Governing Boards of the Bank.
It would be useful, to this end, firstly, to sum up some of the basic messages sent by the poor to the Narayan team, in order to have a better view of their own assessment of their condition. We shall try, later, to see how these views, completed by others, could allow us to gain a more accurate view of what could be done in order to remove the present obstacles to the power of acting, or the potentia of the poor.
Having long been convinced of Spinoza’s findings that the question of a healthy potentia (that is, the vital power of acting with which every human being is endowed with, at one’s birth) remains, all through one’s life, the key to one’s possibilities of blooming, I was personally gratified to note that the Narayan team had also started the list of their items in the subchapter on Findings with the theme of Powerlessness and poverty (In French, Impuissance et pauvreté). In so doing, it has rightly placed on the agenda the most important “lack” of which the poor are now suffering from, that is, imposed powerlessness, a question that no centre of power to my mind has ever thought to recognize.
The central problem of powerlessness is followed by a list of other important items underlined by the Team. It is worth mentioning some of them: Relations with the State (p.269); Networks and Associations of the Poor (p.270); Organizations of the Poor (p. 284): Social fragmentation (p.272). Under this item, important points are raised by the poor: Few poor people feel they have access to justice and the police, and officials and criminals are often accuses being in collusion. Instead of being seeen as ptotectors, where they are mentioned at all the police are largely viewed negatively for their indifference, for their role in intimidation, corruption and crime, and for their ability to instill fear, to harass, and to brutalize. (p.273)
In the subchapter that follows, the Report introduces another important item under the title of Elements of a Strategy for Change (p.273). Points are raised here that appear quite subversive in an institution that is seldom ready to even place on its official agenda, matters such as the following: Start with Poor People’s Realities (p.274) ; Poverty diagnosis by the poor ; Informal livelihoods (p.275) ; Invest in the Organizational Capacity of the Poor (p. 276) ; Implement community-driven approaches (277) ; Under this title, it is said clearly that ”Concern about insecure livelihoods is widespread. Most of the poor who are not involved in agriculture acquire their livelihood in the informal sector, yet most governments and international attention is focused on formal employment opportunities… »
4. The few quotations I borrowed from the Narayan report clearly indicate that a great number of individuals working in many of to-day’s top organizations in charge of “assisting the poor” now realize that the questions facing the immense majority of the poor cornered into destitution cannot be addressed with the kinds of simplistic “solutions” that are being proposed by the experts and the governments running these major institutions. Most of the realities revealed by the Narayan team are daily confirmed by thousands of other observers working in the fields. They all show that solutions that dare not go into the real roots of the present processes of pauperization could only contribute to a further deterioriation of the situation.
If something could be done, it is still in the hands of the actors concerned and their friends everywhere who are ready to go deeper into the real causes of the present tragedy. The answer is not in spending additional money on the so-called poor while promoting unbridled globalization and economic growth without trying to understand why millions of people are forced to rush into shanty towns and favellas. It is to work together with the poor in order to help them find by themselves new ways of increasing their potentia and “reinventing” their present.
It is reported that Confucius was once asked what would be the first thing he would do if he would become an Emperor. His answer was: “The most important thing would be for me to rectify the meaning of words!” As in modern times, the misuse and the manipulation of words has become a major tool for the colonization of minds, I would like to start these short comments on poverty by following the wish of the great Chinese sage.
To begin with, poverty is NOT what the modern newspeak has made of it. At the dawn of the present millennium, as the World Bank launched its most mediatized programme for eradicating poverty in the world, it thought to offer a universal and clear-cut definition for the word. Accordingly, it decided that whoever earned less than one U.S. dollar a day would be classified under the label of absolute poverty, while the condition of those able to earn at least 2 U.S dollars a day was called a relative poverty. Following that decision, the Bank declared, in the year 2002, that 57% of the world population were living in poverty.
Some twenty years before, a group of highly respected historians of poverty participating in a two-year study at the Sorbonne, proposed a totally different approach to the search for a universal definition of the concept. Their work ended up with quite a different type of statement. “Poverty is too general, too relative, too ambiguous and, especially, with too many different interpretations, to be objectively and validly defined on a universal scale.
Actually, the thousands of meanings given to the word by different cultures and languages cannot question this latter position. For even some statisticians or economists would be happier with a broad definition like the one proposed by the World Bank no type of classification could change the fact that there are as many forms of poverty as there are different forms or riches, for that matter) as there are human beings. Only a small group of poverty experts or “poverticians” (as Edward Koch, a former Mayor of New York) had called them. could deny that poverty is a human condition, and in that sense, all humans are all somehow poor and rich”. As a matter of fact, the history of the word shows well that in most languages, the poor as a noun or substantive appeared only in the beginning of the first Century, while the adjective poor had existed long before. For Ivan Illich, poverty was always “understood as a pervasive feature in the social landscape of every culture. Primarily and above all, it referred to the precarious conditions within which most people survived most of the time. Poverty was a general concept for a specific cultural interpretation of the necessity to live within very narrow limits, defined differently for each place and time.
On another plane, not all forms of poverty were always perceived as a shame or a scourge, or a “violation of human rights”, as it was presented in an official Unesco document in the year 2002. There were indeed different perceptions of that predicament as there were different types of poverty. As such, voluntary poverty represented the free choice of the most virtuous humans in every society. In all human societies, those who had freely chosen poverty were considered often as saints or holders of the highest forms of riches, what the Persian poet/philosopher called “living riches”. In another way, convivial poverty that often represented the predicament of the “common man”, had its own particular riches as it often represented a quite honourable mode of living with what was considered as the his or her modest share in the riches produced by his or her community. As a rule, convivial poverty represented a way of life particularly rich in their traditions of simplicity, frugality, sharing and hospitality. For Joseph Proudhon, that form of poverty represented “the normal condition of humankind in civilization” ( la condition normale de l’Homme en civilisation).
As long as these different categories of poor could rely on what Ivan Illich called the “cultural hammock” of their convivial poverty, they could keep off the danger of falling into destitution or misery. “And there was always the ground level to depend on, as a squatter or beggar. This side of the grave, no one could sink below ground. Hell was a real pit, but it was for those who had not shared with the poor in this life, to be suffered after death.
The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Economic Man (homo oeconomicus) did however produce an historical break in the perception of poverty. As the new economic and socially produced needs started to colonize the vernacular sense of human needs, the new poor were subjected to all kinds of moral and material pressures. They were manipulated into abandoning their own subsistence economy against the promises of a modern and more productive one that was mainly geared to create for them unreachable needs. It was under these conditions that the old “cultural hammocks” of the poor started first to loose their resilience and fitness to their own real needs. In a short time, the process acted the same way as an HIV retroactive virus pierces its way through a weakened membrane of its victim with a view to changing the genes of its prey against its own. The systemic production of what René Girard coined as “mimetic desires”, further activated the destruction of the old “cultural hammocks” and the parallel destruction of all the shields that the poor had created for their defence with a view to ultimately exorcizing their fall into destitution.
2.The crux of the matter is still that a great majority of human beings, perhaps even more the 4 billions registered by the World Bank, are today threatened by the “pitfalls” of dire destitution that are waiting to absorb them into different kinds of destitution and pauperization. For the first time in history, a most complex variety of old and new forms of destitution are being produced by modern economy that seem to take as their main target the potentia proper to every human being, that form of innate, God-given and God-like vital force that constitutes the perfect singularity of every human being. As Jacques Ellul has rightly put it, the old proletariat of which Marx was speaking may even be in the process of being absorbed by economy. Yet, new categories of modernized poor are now emerging who might even have crossed the so-called poverty lines everywhere, but whose features of alienation are not less that that of the old proletariats. He had coined these emerging classes as the proletariats of affluence.
3.It appears, thus, clearly that the problématique of poverty cannot be reduced to economic and statitistical simplifications. Neither the highly multidimensional and culture-specific aspects of poverty could make it the property of one particular income-related group. The more a poverty oriented archeologist would try to use quantitative or data-based criteria for defining poverty in general, the greater would be his or her chances of missing the essential; the greater also would be the risk of making generalisations that end up with the production of dependency producing recipes. Populist “solutions” that are then produced by “do-gooders” of all kinds, ultimately turn the poor into the destitute.
To these general, philosophical and conceptual difficulties, associated with the latest trends of poverty-therapy, one should add three others that highly complicate the issue: a) the strong desire of “do-gooders” of all kinds to propose quick solutions to their sufferings, b) the lack of sensitivity to the fact that such “solutions” act often as relief therapies that only aggravate the case of the patient, c) the illusion that what has appeared “good” and useful to their well-off doctors necessarily apply to the case of people living under totally different conditions. If most of the recipes offered “the poor”, by large aid-providing institution, including some NGOs, have often aggravated rather than improved the condition of the poor, one or a combination of these factors have had their part of responsibilities in the case.
Last but not least, a strange yet striking type of schizophrenia seems now to appear in the large “aid-providing” institutions of the world, especially in those closely associated with the capitalistic machinery. The World Bank provides us with one of the most striking examples of this type of disease, particularly during the years it was preparing its well-known world campaign for the eradication of poverty. For all these reasons, the document of the Bank, prepared by Deepa Narayan and her team, under the title Voices of the Poor; Can Anyone Hear Us ?, is on the one hand, an impressive source for knowing what poverty represents for a high percentage of the poor presently living in the world. On the other hand, it reveals that the threat of a possible explosive situation has led the Bank to display an extraordinary schizophrenic attitude.
Let us now try to mention at least some of the demands of the 40000 selected poor whom the Narayan team have interviewed. Besides some comments of a general nature, this part of my presentation will only include some of the titles chosen by the Report in its Chapter 7, entitled Conclusions: The Way Forward.
In a nutshell, what the Narayan’s team has reported to us from their interviews with their selected team of poor persons, paradoxically reflect what the staunchest critics of the Bank’s policies have hitherto addressed to it. Namely, that the huge variety of poor, as well as what their poverty means to them, can NOT be reduced to an income evaluated at one or two dollars a day. Anyone reading the Deepa Narayan report has no difficulty to find out that what she and her team want us to know has never been understood or shared by the expert “poverticians” and their friends in the Governing Boards of the Bank.
It would be useful, to this end, firstly, to sum up some of the basic messages sent by the poor to the Narayan team, in order to have a better view of their own assessment of their condition. We shall try, later, to see how these views, completed by others, could allow us to gain a more accurate view of what could be done in order to remove the present obstacles to the power of acting, or the potentia of the poor.
Having long been convinced of Spinoza’s findings that the question of a healthy potentia (that is, the vital power of acting with which every human being is endowed with, at one’s birth) remains, all through one’s life, the key to one’s possibilities of blooming, I was personally gratified to note that the Narayan team had also started the list of their items in the subchapter on Findings with the theme of Powerlessness and poverty (In French, Impuissance et pauvreté). In so doing, it has rightly placed on the agenda the most important “lack” of which the poor are now suffering from, that is, imposed powerlessness, a question that no centre of power to my mind has ever thought to recognize.
The central problem of powerlessness is followed by a list of other important items underlined by the Team. It is worth mentioning some of them: Relations with the State (p.269); Networks and Associations of the Poor (p.270); Organizations of the Poor (p. 284): Social fragmentation (p.272). Under this item, important points are raised by the poor: Few poor people feel they have access to justice and the police, and officials and criminals are often accuses being in collusion. Instead of being seeen as ptotectors, where they are mentioned at all the police are largely viewed negatively for their indifference, for their role in intimidation, corruption and crime, and for their ability to instill fear, to harass, and to brutalize. (p.273)
In the subchapter that follows, the Report introduces another important item under the title of Elements of a Strategy for Change (p.273). Points are raised here that appear quite subversive in an institution that is seldom ready to even place on its official agenda, matters such as the following: Start with Poor People’s Realities (p.274) ; Poverty diagnosis by the poor ; Informal livelihoods (p.275) ; Invest in the Organizational Capacity of the Poor (p. 276) ; Implement community-driven approaches (277) ; Under this title, it is said clearly that ”Concern about insecure livelihoods is widespread. Most of the poor who are not involved in agriculture acquire their livelihood in the informal sector, yet most governments and international attention is focused on formal employment opportunities… »
4. The few quotations I borrowed from the Narayan report clearly indicate that a great number of individuals working in many of to-day’s top organizations in charge of “assisting the poor” now realize that the questions facing the immense majority of the poor cornered into destitution cannot be addressed with the kinds of simplistic “solutions” that are being proposed by the experts and the governments running these major institutions. Most of the realities revealed by the Narayan team are daily confirmed by thousands of other observers working in the fields. They all show that solutions that dare not go into the real roots of the present processes of pauperization could only contribute to a further deterioriation of the situation.
If something could be done, it is still in the hands of the actors concerned and their friends everywhere who are ready to go deeper into the real causes of the present tragedy. The answer is not in spending additional money on the so-called poor while promoting unbridled globalization and economic growth without trying to understand why millions of people are forced to rush into shanty towns and favellas. It is to work together with the poor in order to help them find by themselves new ways of increasing their potentia and “reinventing” their present.
