Re-Politicising Poverty: Relational Re-conceptualisations of Impoverishment

This collection of essays extends cross-disciplinary conversations between co-authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political-economic injustice and socio-legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics, providing conjunctural and multi-scalar analyses that illuminate the operations of power in producing impoverishment. They direct our attention beyond topics typically associated with poverty studies, showing how processes such as bordering, migrant illegality, racial capitalism and caring community politics intersect in poverty politics today. Our introductory essay argues for a relational poverty analysis that addresses the entanglements of cultural politics, those that produce classificatory schemes, together with political-economic processes that produce various forms of poverty politics in the current conjuncture. We chart thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics across the collection’s essays in order to analyse current hegemonic formations of poverty governance as well as alternative imaginations and actions that are resisting and reworking relations of impoverishment. Ultimately, this collection expands vocabularies and analytical repertoires for understanding the ongoing ways in which impoverishment is produced and resisted, positing relationality as key to re-politicising poverty towards a more just future.     

The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry: Forging Spaces of Dispossession

Abstract: Credit card debt is a ubiquitous feature of neoliberal capitalism. To explain the notable growth of credit card usage in the US, I adopt a historical materialist approach that employs two key analytical concepts—cannibalistic capitalism and the debtfare state—to capture the material, institutional and ideological dimensions of this process. Viewed within the bounds of cannibalistic capitalism, a mode of accumulation primarily based on the expansion of fictitious capital and secondary forms of exploitation, the debtfare state enhances the social power of money by allowing major credit card issuers (banks) to generate high levels of income from uncapped interest rates and policies that ensure the extension of plastic money to those who fall within Marx's category of the surplus population. While the expansion of debt subjects surplus workers to the disciplinary requirements of the market, it is unable to suspend the main tensions of cannibalistic capitalism, prompting ongoing reconstructions of the debtfare state.     

Choices and responsibilities: finding the balance

Rapid population growth means the addition of a billion more people in 11 years. The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), scheduled for September 5-13, 1994, will address the issue of population growth and design strategies for slower growth with economic development and environmental protection. This article summarizes Dr. Nafis Sadik's special preparatory message about the conference. The ICPD will address the issues of reproductive health, affordable family planning (FP), and informed choice. There will be an emphasis on better health care, housing, education, and other poverty alleviation measures. Empowerment of women through educational and economic opportunity and increased foreign aid are also themes. Improvements in the quality of life as well as demographic and social change are required. The key to slowing population growth is to meet the need for FP services to reduce fertility. Reexamination of the life-styles of the more affluent is also required. Needs and resources must be balanced. Sustainable development and resource use will depend upon slower population growth, more rational population distribution, alleviation of poverty, environmentally safer consumption patterns, and other measures. The 1994 draft plan of action has a broad mandate which recognizes the linkages between population and development. Target dates and reproductive rights language are bracketed and will be discussed during the conference. Quantitative goals are set for education, child and maternal mortality reduction, and universal access to FP and reproductive health services. The public should be made aware of the development and population links. Developing countries are asked to devote 20% of their government budget to social development. Countries by their action or inaction will choose a world population size in 2015 ranging from 7.27 to 7.92 billion. The difference of 660 million in 20 years is equal to the current population in Africa. The high projection for 2050 is 12.5 billion people. The ICPD will be the last global opportunity before the turn of the century to address the challenges of shared responsibility for the future of life on earth.     

Poverty in Transit: Uber,Taxi Coops,and the Struggle over Philadelphia's Transportation Economy

This article examines how ride‐hailing companies like Uber have disrupted not only the mainstream taxi industry but also progressive efforts to remedy that industry's shortcomings. The article focuses on Alliance Taxi Cooperative (ATC), a failed taxi worker cooperative in Philadelphia. ATC was deeply committed to economic democracy, living wages, and outreach to underserved communities. Its ambitions were nevertheless thwarted by regulatory obstruction and market disruptions caused by Uber. Drawing on relational poverty theory and literature on solidarity economy and platform capitalism, I suggest that ATC's story offers more than a cautionary tale about the pitfalls facing small taxi start‐ups. It also illuminates a great deal about the exploitative conditions and discriminatory geographies of the taxi and ride‐hailing industry, the biases of regulatory agencies, and the complicated ways that platform capitalism is refiguring class dynamics.     

PPT战略与背包旅游——以滇西北为例

贫困问题是世界性的难题。云南省作为我国旅游资源最为丰富的省份之一,同时也是全国贫困县最多的省份,其贫困地区的分布与旅游资源的分布基本一致,是中国旅游资源丰富与经济极度贫困对照鲜明的代表性地区。笔者根据在滇西北高原上逾期一个月的背包和徒步旅游的实地调研,以虎跳峡徒步旅游路线为案例,指出通过背包旅游对贫困地区进行开发,实施PPT战略,是适合贫困人口发展与创建和谐社区的必然选择。     

MONEY FLOWS LIKE MERCURY: THE GEOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL FINANCE

ABSTRACT. If the social relations and inherited configuration of production were at the core of economic geography a decade ago, these aspects of the world are increasingly taken for granted. The global scope of industry and corporate strategy has claimed increasing attention over the past decade. And while any 'new' economic geography must have something to say about the nature of human agency and the role of institutions in structuring the landscape, care must be taken not to exaggerate their significance for constructive interaction. In point of fact, the global finance industry is an essential lens through which to study contemporary capitalism from the top-down and the bottom-up. If we are to understand the economic landscape of twenty-first century capitalism, it should be understood through global financial institutions, its social formations and investment practices. This argument is developed by reference to the recent literature on the geography of finance and a metaphor – money flows like mercury – designed to explicate the spatial and temporal logic of global capital flows. Some may dispute this argument, but in doing so they lament the passing of an era rather than advancing a convincing counterclaim about how the world is and what it might become. All this means that we have to rethink the significance of geographical scale and organizational processes as opposed to an unquestioned commitment to localities.     

Crisis of Ageing in Less Developed Countries: Too Much Consumption or Too Little Production?

The age structure in many developing countries is changing—the population is ageing. There is increasing concern over the social and economic costs of caring for this ageing population, and the capacity of the state to finance the expected rising social expenditure has come to dominate the debate on the economics of population ageing. In this context the elderly are considered primarily as consumers and ‘dependent’ on the working population. Following the Keynesian and post-Keynesian literature, this article argues that such a view of the elderly is incorrect, for several reasons. Firstly, empirical evidence shows that the aged do not consume (relative to their income) more than the rest of the population. Secondly, the issue of ‘dependency’ of the aged should be put in the broader context of the dependency of the unemployed and under-employed in a market economy. Thirdly, the focus of the debate should move away from consumption and towards production; and finally, since the old make claims on the national output on the basis of their accumulated assets, savings and pensions, the distributional issues (with regard to assets as well as incomes) have to be an integral part of any pension system in order to alleviate poverty among the elderly.     

Whose Wealth Is It Anyway? Mozambique's Outstanding Economic Growth with Worsening Rural Poverty

Despite rapid economic growth and massive inflows of aid, rural poverty in Mozambique is worsening. Agricultural production and productivity have not increased in the last decade. Use of chemical fertilizers and other modern technology is at a low level and decreasing. The present development model emphasizes that the role of government and donors is to provide human capital and infrastructure, while the private sector is responsible for economic development and ending poverty. The most recent national surveys confirm what is being seen elsewhere in Africa — that this non‐interventionist strategy does not raise agricultural productivity or reduce poverty. While 80 per cent of Mozambique's population is engaged in agriculture, this sector contributes only 20 per cent of GDP. This suggests that investments in agriculture are likely to generate pro‐poor growth, both to rural and urban dwellers. This policy failure is increasingly recognized, but donors and government have invested too much political capital in the current policy to change easily.     

Third-world development: urbanizing for the future

This article reviews some issues reflected in the 1996 UN Habitat II agenda and recent research on urbanization. The themes of the 1996 Habitat conference were urban development, urban poverty, and governance, civil society, and social capital. It is expected that over 50% of total world population will live in cities in the year 2000. Cities are viewed both as engines of economic growth and centers of severe economic, environmental, and social problems. There is some disagreement about whether cities are rational economic structures or what the World Bank's urban agenda is and its relationship with macroeconomic policy. Discussions of global urban issues are criticized for their neglect of issues of equity and poverty, cultural diversity, and identity and representation. Habitat II also stressed urban sustainability. There is growing recognition that urban management involves more than the "Brown Agenda" of environmental and physical aspects of urban growth. Recent studies identify how politics and power affect people's access to basic urban services. Urban economic activity can also contribute to environmental problems. Urban growth affects the provision of health services. Although there is not a consensus on the role of cities in expanding economic and social development and the best management practices, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that urban processes are varied throughout the developing world. The links between urban and rural areas differentiate cities and expose the need to understand the role of intermediate urban areas surrounding and between larger cities. Poverty has become increasingly urbanized, but the extent of poverty is unknown. Habitat II was an unprecedented effort to engage nongovernment groups, local government staff, trade unions, and the private sector and to emphasize community participation. Networks of trust and reciprocity are key to solving poverty, inequality, and disempowerment problems.     

How Capitalism Will Save Colonialism: The Privatization of Reserve Lands in Canada

This paper surveys the ways in which the First Nations Property Ownership Act (FNPOA) is the site of both tension and alliance between state, non‐state, and local Indigenous interests converging around a common agenda of land “modernization” in Canada. It is a convergence, I argue, that must be read in the context of a reorganization of society under neoliberalism. The FNPOA legislation is discursively framed to acknowledge Indigenous land rights while the bill simultaneously introduces contentious measures to individualize and municipalize the quasi‐communal land holding of reserves. The intersections of alliance around this land modernization project foreground the complex ways in which capitalism and colonialism, though inextricably tied, perform distinguishable economic processes, and how we must be attentive to the particulars of their co‐articulation with local formations of indigeneity.     

浙江三泉村700年变迁模式试探

三泉村自南宋淳熙八年(1181)建村,至明嘉靖三十四年(1555),先后产生了2名进士、1名举人,但随着人口的繁衍,村区人口无传率上升,夫妇年龄差增大,人文逐渐衰弱,700年问历经了盛衰变迁。这一变迁模式对于以农业为主业的传统山村社会具有一定的普遍意义。     

The Dynamism of Integral Liberation: Reconsidering Gustavo Gutiérrez's Central Concept after “the End of History”

This essay questions Daniel Bell Jr.'s claim that liberation theology is ignorant of the links between the cultural and structural formations of capitalism. Focusing especially on Bell's treatment of the thought of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the article argues that Gutiérrez's concept of integral liberation provides a complex account of the manner in which the structural, cultural, and theological levels of liberation are interrelated. It contends, contra Bell, that Gutiérrez's concept does not reduce politics to “statecraft” but instead provides an illuminating framework for understanding the integrity of Christian life within the contemporary neoliberal globalization project. Finally, the paper moves to consider the manner in which Gutiérrez's concept might be fruitfully paired with Leslie Sklair's theorization of global capitalism in order to specify the process of liberation today.     

Not Only Helpless but also Hopeless: Changing Dynamics of Urban Poverty in Turkey,the Case of Sultanbeyli,Istanbul

This paper is an attempt to understand the changing characteristics of urban poverty in Turkey since 1980. First, it analyses how the urban poor in Turkey had adopted aggressive survival strategies by strengthening their solidarity networks on religious, ethnic and cultural bases until the 2000s. Then it sheds light on how those networks have dissolved later on thanks to a set of internal and external factors and concludes that Turkey now faces deepening poverty levels and engendering new forms and dynamics of poverty. This paper is based on the Sultanbeyli district of Istanbul, a district almost entirely composed of unauthorized houses whose population grew at an unprecedented rate after 1980; and it is a perfect case for the study of issues relating to migration, urbanization and poverty in Turkish cities.     

Public Intervention and Poverty Alleviation: A Study of the Declining Incidence of Rural Poverty in Kerala,India

In the context of the continuing and lively debate on the estimates, trends and determinants of rural poverty in India, this article examines the sharp decline, since the late 1970s, in the incidence of rural poverty in the state of Kerala, well known for its record of social development. It is argued that, given the slow rate of growth of the Kerala economy in general and agriculture in particular since the mid-1970s, the ‘trickle down’ theory cannot explain the decline in poverty. Similarly, the fact that rural wages have increased faster than the consumer price index does not constitute a sufficient condition for crossing the poverty line. Expansion of state-directed programmes is seen to be the single most important determinant in reducing rural poverty. The effect of public intervention programmes is roughly estimated to be equal to one fifth of the consumption of rural labour households. The lesson of Kerala for poverty alleviation is that social protection expressed in terms of meeting the basic consumption requirements of the poor, especially the vulnerable among the poor, should be a necessary component of development policy. However, this is not a sufficient condition: there should also be a growth strategy which would provide adequate employment to all members of the labour force from the poorer sections of the population. The current line of official thinking in India, in the context of economic liberalization, is hardly conducive to such a strategy.     

Poverty Reduction with Growth and Redistribution

In the late 1990s the bilateral and multilateral development agencies placed increasing emphasis on poverty reduction in developing countries. This led to the establishment by the United Nations of the ‘International Development Targets’ for poverty reduction. The target of poverty reduction might be achieved through faster economic growth alone, through redistribution, or through a combination of the two. This article presents an analytical framework to assess the effectiveness of growth and redistribution for poverty reduction. It concludes that redistribution, either of current income or the growth increment of income, is more effective in reducing poverty for a majority of countries than growth alone.     

当前俄罗斯人口地理变动的新特点

俄罗斯是一个地广人稀的国家。在20世纪90年代世界性人口增长的大背景下,人口持续减少,已成为影响国家发展和民族生存的重大问题,特别是其人口的发展显示出有悖于世界人口增长普遍规律的一些特征,非常值得探讨和研究。本文在对俄罗斯人口的增长、结构、分布和城市化发展特点等四个方面进行全面分析的基础上,探讨了俄罗斯人口危机产生的经济、社会和文化原因。指出解决俄罗斯人口问题的当务之急是加快发展经济,全面提高人口的生存环境质量。     

省级多维减贫经验:以青海省为例

多维减贫是指"以减少贫困人口为基础,缓解贫困问题的恶性发展及贫困问题的衍生影响,针对贫困的多个维度,如收入贫困、人类贫困、信息贫困及生态贫困等形成测定和监控系统,进行综合性防治,促进人类生存发展与自由。"本文以青海省为例,在省级层面对多维减贫进行必要性及可能性的分析,并在总结经验的基础上得出了指导实践的相对成熟的减贫新思想。     

现代性与乌托邦张力下的科学社会主义中国化

西方资本主义对中国的侵略,既包含了资本主义文明的冲击,又是现代性在世界范围内分裂的表现。这样,就形成了中国人在现代化追求中的乌托邦情结。对资本主义进行判断,消除现代性成长中的社会分裂,赋予传统理想现代精神,就成为中国现代化制度选择的根据。现代性追求与乌托邦精神构成了科学社会主义中国化的内在张力。     

Frontiers’ violence: The interplay of state of exception,frontier habitus,and organized violence

As global capitalism is expanding to the most remote areas of the world, the notion of “frontier”, where competing social orders are contesting each other, is gaining traction in academic analyses. Contemporary frontiers are associated with resource exploitation in marginalized spaces and processes of socioecological transformation, which are characterized as particularly violent. This article offers a conceptual contribution to the frontier debate by putting violence in the center of a frontier concept. Building on a sociology of violence, this approach assumes that every social order comes with some form of organized violence. We argue that the frontier is characterized by a tidal passage: Existing orders and their institutions, which socially embed and constrain a particular use of violence, are challenged by an expansive order which comes along with new formations of violence, leading to a reorganization of violence. Thus the frontier describes a momentum in which the interplay of social order and organized violence becomes highly disputed. Representatives of the expansive order refuse to recognize existing orders and favour a state of exception, in which law is set aside to impose the new order.     

日本现代化的人口条件

现代化之初,日本的人口有四个基本特征,即高密度、低增长率、低依赖性人口和高素质。高密度的人口是日本现代化的不利因素,如何化不利为有利是日本现代化的关键,而低增长率、低依赖性人口和高素质则是日本经济起飞的重要条件。