[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the many facets of poverty as a prime HR violation. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
1. Let me start with a set of what are truisms* in our work on poverty as perhaps the prime human rights (HR) violation:
- The root of the problem is not poverty, the problem is opulence. (Theo Ruyter).
- To the accumulation of misery on the one hand, corresponds the accumulation of capital on the other. (Marx)
- The fact that today those rendered poor are less poor than yesterday is not proof of the benefits of Capitalism. (Jorge Majfud)
- It is clear that especially in countries where trade unions are weak, the damage of Capitalism to people’s welfare has ended up being considerable.
*: Is this a truism as well?: Misery, when together with an idea (of the inalienable rights people do have?), is the most powerful engine of revolution. (Victor Hugo)
Poverty should be made illegal (Riccardo Petrella)
-Those rendered poor cannot wait.
2. It is surprising to note that many academics still believe that all policies to fight poverty are necessarily positive and will, in the end, if not eradicate poverty, at least help people rendered poor to survive. This is a sad mistake and leads to wrong assessments of social policies such as those promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions.
3. When the World Bank put poverty reduction on the international agenda in 1990, this had nothing to do with social justice. It was an openly neoliberal policy** with partial and targeted programs, and was not an improvement to meagre existing social protection policies, but rather an alternative to them:
- The policy claimed countries rendered poor needed specific policies to close the ‘gap’ with countries rendered rich by those poor countries;
- to do that, the policy gave as much freedom to markets as possible;
- consumption rights took the place of labor rights;
- it promoted market-determined minimum incomes and opposed broader social protection programs (meaning labor markets had to be deregulated and minimum wages abolished).
- it gave new meaning to hide the ideological shift away from welfare states given that welfare states implied a regime of ‘legally regulated solidarity’.
**: For neo-liberals, poverty is the result of mistaken government policies with mistaken ideas of welfare states that exclude people rendered poor from the market –and they do not like that part of it.
Take child poverty
4. Obviously, poor children live in poor families with parents who do not earn enough to give their children a decent standard of living. There are no poor children in non-poor families and there are no non-poor children in poor families. Yet, more and more attention goes to these poor kids without taking care of their parents. One can only be happy if public authorities do all they possibly can to provide children with the necessary nutritional resources and give them a decent education. But what about decent jobs and wages for their daddies and mummies? If one really believes in the autonomy and empowerment of people rendered poor, should this not be a priority? (Francine Mestrum)
More often than not, the great power of those rendered poor is their moral wealth
-Community leaders are mostly rich in moral leadership.
5. Alongside the greater altruism of those rendered poor, the selfishness and aggressiveness of those rendered rich is also manifest. Since the matter of reducing poverty is redistributing wealth, if properly sensitized and motivated, those rendered poor by the maldistribution of wealth will understand the need for participation, organization and better forms of communication; they further understand the need for leadership and ultimately for mobilization to stake their demands. They will also understand that remaining passive is not a solution (or an option) and thus need to define and set goals and a development methodology to go with.***
***: In the midst of economic poverty, we constantly see groups of women, young people and the elderly communicating and organizing themselves, slowly realizing that the first alienation is that of sailing adrift without a project. (Let us note that, looking at the other side of the coin, working in the midst of poverty, human rights activists do indeed go through a process of self-discovery and re-motivation). (Luis Weinstein)
6. Poverty is a material deficit, wealth a deficit of moral value:
- Wealthy people do not want to share their wealth, they want to moralize and even blame the poor.
- Poverty research has created a semantic soup in which the ingredients got totally lost.
- Poverty and inequality are interesting topics for research, but they do not take into account the real and tangible problems of people –thus avoiding the consideration of the material reality of poverty.
- It is as if we did not know what poverty really is in a market economy, i.e., mainly the lack of resources to acquire what is needed to survive.
- What happens with traditional research on poverty is that all the different dimensions of poverty are identified as being poverty itself, while they are only symptoms that can eventually be reduced with decent incomes. (F. Mestrum)
To end, some more truisms, that, as the above, also qualify for my list of iron laws
7. Redistribution (disparity reduction) has never been on the agenda. Let us face it:
- Poverty reduction does not touch the wealth of the rich, in fact quite the contrary;
- poverty reduction has not altered the existing power relations either;
- poverty reduction policies have necessarily been ‘targeted’ at ‘the poor’ –with all the major problems this brings about;
- poverty reduction has led to the slow erosion of middle classes and, being ineffective and unsustainable, has led to the polarization of societies.
8. Ultimately, poverty reduction policies are only ‘end-of-the-pipe’ solutions and, in the meantime, allow inequality to grow. (I remind you that welfare states were meant to correct the inequality created by markets).
Ergo
9. It is disparity reduction that ought to be fully integrated into rights-based legal systems. Only claim holders empowering themselves will allow them to defend and fulfil their inalienable rights. Human Rights Learning emerges as a priority here yet again.
10. I am aware all these truisms are part of a highly political agenda. A new political transition/shift is needed, away from poverty reduction reoriented towards, disparity reduction, HR, solidarity and towards putting human dignity at the center. (the above from F. Mestrum)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com