Abstract
Even if the Occupy Wall Street movement has, in an astonishingly short time span, disrupted the ideological landscape by highlighting the increasing divide between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, the perception that poverty is primarily caused by personal fate or bad individual choices still remains deeply anchored in common sense. Aren’t there numerous examples that demonstrate that dropping out of college, getting pregnant, getting divorced, ending up in one of the famous female-headed families that haunt the “moral” debates on poverty, or failing to adapt to the demands of the economy actually play a role? Isn’t there an overall and ever-recurring tendency (even among the poor) to draw a sharp line between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor? It was not long ago that the first wave of Tea Party mass events was kicked off by business reporter Rick Santelli’s TV rant on February 19, 2009. While standing on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, he denounced the government’s attempt of “subsidizing the losers’ mortgages” with public money.
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Notes
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Qunitin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 324, 328ff, 348;
Jan Rehmann, “The Relevance of Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony for Social Justice Movements,” in Willie Baptist and Jan Rehmann, Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 116–19.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
Charles A. Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
William DiFazio, Ordinary Poverty: A Little Food and Cold Storage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 70.
Martin Gilens, “How the Poor Became Black. The Racialization of American Poverty in the Mass Media,” in Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds., Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 2003), 123–124, 126.
In this vein, Loïc Wacquant has criticized the sociological poverty studies of Mitchell Duneier, Elijah Anderson, and Katherine Newman, and demonstrated that the reversals of right-wing underclass myths end up in celebrating a “benign” neoliberal value system among the poor. See Loic Wacquant, “Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Etnography,” AJB 107.6 (May 2002): 1468–1532.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976/1867), 769.
Some social theorists define class in terms of a “fundamental class-process” of surplus production and appropriation; for example, see Richard D. Wolff and Stephen A. Resnick, Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), l46ff; 91ff, 129ff.
See also Richard Wolff’s contribution to this book (4ff). Others define class in terms of the respective positions in the fundamental power grid of a society; for some examples, see Joerg Rieger in the introduction to this book; Michael Zweig, ed., What’s Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 2ff, 10;
and Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 10, 26, 59. I cannot see insurmountable differences between these approaches. Since exploitation is in fact one of the most condensed and ossified power relations of modern society (yet not the only one), the definitions can to a large degree be translated into each other.
Wolfgang Fritz Haug, High-Tech-Kapitalismus: Analysen zur Produktionsweise, Arbeit, Sexualität, Krieg und Hegemonie (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2003), 12–13, 36–42.
See the distinction in William Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 14–16.
Mario Candeias, Neoliberalismus-Hochtechnologie-Hegemonie: Grundrisse einer transnationalen kapitalistischen Produktions- und Lebensweise. Eine Kritik (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2004), 205.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 939.
Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (London: Merlin Press, 2003);
for a vivid description of white collar insecurity, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
According to UN calculations, the “informal proletariat” will count about 2–3 billions in 2030, more than the part of the working class (1.5–2 billions) that works in formal labor relations. See Mike Davis, “The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos,” Social Text 22.4 (Winter 2004): 13, (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_text/v022/22.4davis.html);
also, see Mike Davis, The Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 176ff, 199ff.
See Poulantzas’ distinctions between class as “place” and as “position,” between the reproduction of class “places” and of “agents,” and the role of ideological apparatuses therein. Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1978), 14–24.
Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 380.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 110, 124–125, 175, 338–339.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 103. By defining class as “collective acts of resistance” to power (104), Hardt and Negri reduce the concept to its processual meaning as a “class for itself” and thus eliminate the structural meaning of objective “places” in the production of surplus. The consecutive attempt to base the multitude on the notion of “biopolitical” production is not convincing to me.
See Thomas Frank’s analysis of the misguided working-class anger in Kansas. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 5ff, 16–17, and on the right-wing populism of the Tea Party, which channeled the widespread public anger against the bank bailouts away from Wall Street to Washington: “an uprising against government and taxes and federal directives” and “in favor of the very conditions that had allowed Wall Street to loot the world”;
see Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (New York: Henry Holt, 2012), 41–42.
Mike Davis, The Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 201–202.
Pierre Bourdieu, ed., Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 63–64.
I have tried to reinterpret Bourdieu’s “destiny effect” as the dark flip side of the neoliberal interpellations to self-mobilization and creativity; see Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013), 13, 222, 317–318.
Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question (London: Transaction, 2003), 390.
Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Study of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 244.
Ibid., 246‴247. Lister refers to Sartre’s notion of “seriality” to describe a weaker form of collectivity without a shared identity: “People in poverty may thus constitute a serial collectivity, without necessarily having anything in common other than their poverty and societal reactions to it.” Ruther Lister, Poverty (Polity: Cambridge, 2004).
Mario Candeias, “Unmaking and Remaking of Class: The ‘Impossible’ Precariat between Fragmentation and Movement,” Policy Paper of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung 3 (2007): 1–10.
With barely concealed racism and classism, a delegate at an AFL-CIO convention warned his organization of winding up as “a movement of strawberry pickers and chicken pluckers.” This is quoted in Vanessa Tait, Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor from below (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 195.
See, for example, the study of Jennifer Jihye Chun, “The Limits of Labor Exclusion: Redefining the Politics of Split Labor Markets under Globalization,” Critical Sociology 34.3 (2008): 439ff.
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 9, 30;
Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire: Theology and Politics in a New Key (London: SCM Press, 2009), 11, 22, 176–177, 188, 190.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2005), vol. 4, 491–92.
To name just a few studies, on Workers Centers, see Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); on Poor Workers’ Unions, see Vanessa Tait, Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below, on the struggles for water in postindustrial Detroit, see Chris Caruso, “A Case Study on Organizing: The Struggle for Water in Postindustrial Detroit,” in Baptist and Rehmann, Pedagogy of the Poor, 84–100.
For a Gramscian analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Occupy Wall Street, see Jan Rehmann, “Occupy Wall Street and the Question of Hegemony—A Gramscian Analysis,” Socialism and Democracy 27.1 (March 2013): 1–18.
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Rehmann, J. (2013). Poverty and Poor People’s Agency in High-Tech Capitalism. In: Rieger, J. (eds) Religion, Theology, and Class. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339249_8
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