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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| William DiFazio, Ordinary Poverty: A Little Food and Cold Storage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2006)
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| A GLOBE AND MAIL opinion piece, entitled "Time for a Fair Deal for Low-Income Canadians" (1 June 2006) noted that the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights concluded that legislated minimum wages in Canada are set too low to keep people out of poverty. The article then reported uncritically a list of reforms proposed by the Ontario-based Task Force on Modernizing Income Security for Working Age Results. The task force produced a "road map for reform," allegedly meant to "ensure that all working-age adults have the supports they require to participate fully in their communities and to contribute to keeping Canada's economy healthy and growing." Significantly, however, these supposed advocates for the poor, with their complex and sometimes rather technical proposals, said nothing whatsoever about pegging minimum wages above the poverty line. |
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According to William DiFazio, whose book focuses on the American poor, that is unfortunately exactly what one should expect from middle-class anti-poverty activists, both professional and volunteer, including operators of food banks. DiFazio is himself a long-time volunteer at a New York soup kitchen and his personal experiences cause him to reject the fashionable arguments from the Right, and sometimes the Left as well, that the non-poor who claim the right to speak on behalf of the poor are opportunistic individuals fattening on the poor while reducing the pot of potential government funds that could be handed directly to the poor. Rather, they are well-meaning people who try to respond to the immediate needs of the poor and become trapped within the logic of an economic system that denies the responsibility of either capital or the state to eliminate poverty. Instead, the focus is on providing the short-term needs of individuals while working on altering their attitudes and behaviours so that they become employable. |
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But the approach of these good liberals is self-defeating, according to DiFazio. In the first place, the resources available to public and private social agencies to help those in misery are woefully inadequate. DiFazio mentions the poignant story of a black teenager who has lived a rough life on the streets for two years. "I don't want to die in the streets. Hossein, don't let me die in the streets," the boy pleads with a supervisor in the soup kitchen. Hossein reassures the teenager, but "Hossein knows that I know that all the resources of the Bread and Life program, St. John the Baptist Church, and public assistance might not be enough. Hossein may not be able to prevent this youth's death on the streets." (66) Premature death is too often the fate of the soup kitchen's clientele. |
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What's missing from the anti-poverty equation, notes DiFazio, is the political activity of the poor. Marginalized and kept away from the table where their fate is discussed and determined, the poor can neither indict the system that impoverishes them nor demand the "above-poverty-wage jobs" that are the real solution to poverty. "To put it simply, only above-poverty-wage jobs can end poverty. There isn't any evidence that these jobs are being produced. Low unemployment and a tight labor market have not resolved the problems of the inner city. The current boom has barely raised middle-class wages and has completely missed the urban poor. The job solutions of the conservatives and liberals have failed." (20) |
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DiFazio documents the tragic consequences of Bill Clinton's welfare 'reforms' of 1996 which severely restricted access to social assistance. The desperate poor are placed in workfare programs from which they draw a poverty wage and no chance of ever having a long-term job with above-poverty wages. This ruthless exploitation in the interests of capital is justified by reference to a series of overblown myths perpetuated by the capitalist media. The underclass, instead of being presented as the hard-working-but-getting-nowhere people whom they mainly are, are painted as criminals, baby machines, and drug addicts. In truth, all crimes against individuals and households in the US in 1992 accounted for $17.6 billion in lost money and goods, while white-collar crime was estimated at $250 billion. The birth rate for welfare mothers was below the average for the general population, the 'welfare queen' mythology, with its racist overtones, notwithstanding. The drug-addicted and the homeless represented a mere fraction of the poor. "Ordinary poverty" is not caused by shiftlessness and the search for a handout. It is the result of the needs of capital and the ordinary workings of the capitalist economic system. |
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DiFazio notes that the US in the 1970s had an anti-poverty movement led by the poor but that this gave way to a movement of middle-class anti-poverty activists. "The professionalization and bureaucratization of advocates prevents the development of social movements that could move social policy in the direction of the major changes required to end poverty." (24–25) Unfortunately DiFazio provides little explanation as to why grassroots movements gave way to movements from above, limiting himself to an analysis of shifting discourses regarding poverty since the 1970s. While he is hopeful that a movement of the poor to challenge the system that keeps them poor will rise again, he provides only shreds of evidence that any such movement is emerging, all from his own experiences in New York City. |
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Nonetheless, Ordinary Poverty is an astute book that stands out from most of REVIEWS 287 the work that is published on poverty and anti-poverty activism. It is far better theoretically informed than most of that work and its dual emphasis on the shorter working day without a reduction in wages and benefits, on the one hand, and collective responsibility for creating full employment, on the other, provides the likely demands for a rejuvenated anti-poverty movement headed by the poor. DiFazio also makes mincemeat of Foucauldian analyses that neatly separate out discipline from control and press for local power. The poor, notes DiFazio, "are not part of the postmodern gaze." (159) He finds hope in the expanding international struggles against globalization that envision "a new world with democracy and affluence for all." (188) |
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Alvin Finkel
Athabasca University |
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