The Problem of Poverty

Abstract

One of the key slated goals of the Revolución Ciudadana is combating poverty in Ecuador, where the Correa administration portrays itself as the vanguard of a twenty-first-century socialism that claims to prioritize people over capital through the expanded accumulation of the latter and its redistribution through public investments. Using a Gramscian perspective that differentiates between “good sense” and “common sense,” we examine how the Correa administration invokes the need for a “moralization” of politics that re-centers the state as an apparatus that serves citizens rather than special interests. The moral solution to poverty necessitates both institutional restructuring—the dismantling of austerity policies, debt restructuring, and rolling back of development policies that reinforce long-existent hierarchies—and a transformation of how people understand citizenship. We discuss two key efforts to alleviate poverty: Ecuador Estratégico and the Ministry of Social and Economic Inclusion’s cash transfer program (bonos). The former is a public firm funded by 12 percent of the profits and surplus of oil and mining companies to promote the “local development and infrastructure” in areas historically abandoned by the state (namely, the Amazon, but also other poor, rural regions in the coast and highlands). Equally salient in the poverty alleviation effort is a communications apparatus conveying to the populace the beneficence of the state, and, in turn, the obligations of its citizens. For Amazonian indigenous people, poverty alleviation under the Revolución Ciudadana entails subordination to governmental management and control, and one that frames difference-based claims as threatening to social equality.