Bread for all, and roses too…

 

As the OECD explains, “it measures income, but not equality, it measures growth, but not destruction, and it ignores values like social cohesion and the environment.” This school of thought is influenced by Amartya Sen’s seminal contribution to the discussion of deprivations and capabilities. The cornerstone of the thesis being the argument that human poverty should be considered as the absence of opportunities and choices for living a basic human life. But, as David Barkin and Blanca Lemus (2013) caution, “the academic community seems incapable of defining the concept, because of the difficulty of recognising that it is the very structure of society and the operation of the global market that creates inequality and limits the possibilities for generating opportunities that would allow people to progress.” It is with this that I exhort you, dear reader, that we require a new definition of progress!

Peter Block is an author who writes about the restoration of communities and creating systems that restore our humanity. He writes that, “Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire…We think the free market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress.”

Part of my proposed new definition is the acknowledgment that poverty is not the poor’s fault. Firstly, it should be obvious to experts and the proletariat alike that the current world order is designed to create the unpatrolled inequality gaps we are now experiencing. Secondly, studies have shown that chronic stress and uncertainty during childhood, like the kind caused by long-term poverty, can result in epigenetic effects, making stress more difficult to deal with as an adult. There is even evidence that the effects may be inheritable, and it goes a long way to explain why the poor may make poor choices (Cooper, 2017).  And thirdly, poverty is a social status – one ascribed, even imposed, to many people who would not consider themselves so if you asked them. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlin astutely said in 1972 that, “The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”

 

All over the world, people are dreaming of a different kind of progress for themselves. In Ecuador, the concept of ‘good living’ as a translation or adaptation of the expression in Quechua and Aymara, the languages of descendants of the Incan peoples in the region, has been integrated into the Ecuadorian Constitution. It describes a new form of citizens’ coexistence, in harmony and diversity with nature, in order to achieve a good life, or sumak kawsay. As the National Secretary for Planning and Development for Ecuador recently said in an interview, “We believe that the world does not need development alternatives but alternatives to development. It is necessary to create a completely different world (Ramirez, 2011).”

In Mexico, the Zapatistas have long fought a war against neoliberalism (in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement) and the devastation that it brings. In the last few years, it seems the fight for a peoples’ right to own or control their land and resources against corporations and governments has become the new battleground for human rights. The number of land rights activists killed tripled last year as evidence.

A hotly-debated, much-maligned proposal is to introduce an unconditional, universal basic income (UBI). UBI centres on the idea that the government would pay a flat fee to every adult citizen – regardless of their engagement in skill-building activities or the paid labour market – to complement any existing social security and welfare programs. Claudia von Werlhof, a prominent writer and professor of women’s studies in Austria, writes that, “In the North, thousands of local networks exist in which ‘‘free money’’ replaces money that comes with interest, accumulates value, and serves as a means for speculation rather than trade (Lietaer, 2002). A ‘‘solidarity economy’’ and a ‘‘green economy’’ attempts to expand globally and challenge the prevailing ‘‘profit economy’’ (Milani, 2000). In both the North and the South, people experiment with so-called ‘‘participatory budgets’’ in which the inhabitants of neighborhoods or whole towns decide on how to use tax money. There are also discussions of the concept of an economy of gift-giving in a post-capitalist and post-patriarchal society (Vaughan 2004, 2006).” In any case, she concludes, fundamentally new communal experiences beyond egoism are sought (von Werlhof, 2007).

Von Werlhof elaborates in the manifesto “Women and the Gift Economy” that capitalism is the last throes of patriarchy.

From the point of view of patriarchy, capitalism is the epoch in which women, nature, and life in general are finally successfully replaced by the artificial products of industry: gifts by exchange; subsistence goods by commodities; local markets by a world market; foreign cultures by western culture; concrete wealth—gifts by money, machinery, and capital—the new abstract wealth; living labour by machines; the brain/rational thinking by “artificial intelligence”; women by sex-machines and “cyber-sex”; real mothers and/or their wombs by “mother-machines”; life energy by nuclear energy, chemistry, and bio-industry; and life in general by “artificial life” like genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The only problem that remains today consists in how to “replace” the elements and the globe itself.

(Von Werlhof, 2007).

I entreat us to imagine a radically different worldview, one which speaks about the ‘economics of compassion’ and a progress that encompasses a fair view to what defines quality of life for all.

Von Werlhof concludes:

We have to establish a new economy and a new technology; a new relationship with nature; a new relationship between men and women that will finally be defined by mutual respect; a new relationship between the generations that reaches even beyond the ‘‘seventh’’; and a new political understanding based on egalitarianism and the acknowledgment of the dignity of each individual.

Had this existed in 1973, the trajectory of my father’s and my family’s life would have been different.  Perhaps the wistful look in my parent’s eyes would be too.

 

References

Barkin, D. and Lemus, B. (2013) Understanding Progress: A Heterdox Approach. Sustainability, 5, 417-431.

Bernard L. (2002). The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World. New York: Century Press.

Cooper, C. (20 April 2017). Why Poverty is Like a Disease. Retrieved from http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/why-poverty-is-like-a-disease

Greenfield, K and Winkler, A. (24 June 2015). The U.S. Supreme Court’s Cultivation of Corporate Personhood. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/raisins-hotels-corporate-personhood-supreme-court/396773/

Irvine, J. (9 June 2016). Australia’s top 10 jobs with the biggest gender pay gap revealed. Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australias-top-10-jobs-with-the-biggest-gender-pay-gap-revealed-20160608-gpezg8.html

Milani, B. (2000). Designing the Green Economy. The Postindustrial Alternative to Corporate Globalization: Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield.

Pogge, T. (2010) Politics As Usual. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Ramirez, R and Navarrete, R. (2011). Seeds of ‘Good Living’ In Ecuador? Retrieved from http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/good_living_in_rafael_correas_ecuador

Von Werlhof and Vaughan, G (editor). (2007). Women and the Gift Economy. Canada: Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

Von Werlhof, C. (2008). The Globalization of Neoliberalism, its Consequences, and Some of its Basic Alternatives. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 19 (3).

 

Juhi Sonrexa

Author: Juhi Sonrexa

Juhi Sonrexa has worked in program management for a number of international development organisations, including in the Asia-Pacific region, around issues such as gender inequality, disability inclusion and child rights. She enjoys working in the microcosm of Star Trek's fantasy 'Federation', which is the cross-cultural space of an international NGO, and how while language both divides and unites us, a shared search for eudaemonia drives us.