The Culture of Poverty Revisited: Bringing Back the Working Class

Abstract

The Waxing and Waning of Poverty StudiesFor Marxists there is no greater bugaboo than issue of in America. On surface it would seem that dire amidst over-capacity, over-production and economic plenty of United States would be ideal empirical indictment of irrational brutality of capitalist mode of production. Yet there is probably no academic or policy literature that has been more impervious to Marxist analysis than that on in America. This has been particularly true in urban anthropology, where overwhelming majority of treatments of have been functionalist, a-historical and anti-political. The Weberian typologies upon which this literature relies disappear class by positing a set of imagined categories, based largely on consumption (or lack of it) and composed of society's most exotically grotty and underprivileged. In disappearing Marxist category of proletariat, they also negate working-class political solutions to continuing problems of capitalist reproduction, U.S. style; thus participating in ideological suppression of such solutions, while attempting to ameliorate suffering of those most afflicted.From 1962 publication of Michael Harrington's book The Other America to crisis of 1980s and early 1990s, social scientists have presented many catchy names for this poorest section of American class. The most popular and persistent has been simply the poor, but terms such as culture of poverty, America, homeless, underclass, inner city and Marxian working poor have come and gone. Since President Lyndon Johnson's on poverty in mid 1960s United States government has poured billions of dollars into relief programs directed at this group, despite endless speculation on how to give it demographic parameters and difficulty of finding people who actually self-identify by these vague, politically charged and stigmatizing categories.Over past 40 years, such programs have not eliminated they claimed to target, often failing to accomplish such seemingly modest goals as eliminating public sleeping and preventable diseases. Despite these failures anthropologists and other social scientists have continued to use same research categories to produce literature that is often little more than a tuning mechanism for government bureaucracy.Since 1998 inauguration of Bill Clinton anthropology of has become far less important (Susser 2001). The post-cold war pax Americana that drove almost a decade of continuous economic growth had Democrats and Republicans alike competing to dismantle New Deal/Great Society relief programs, leaving studies a less attractive area of research. Since election of George W. Bush orgy of economic self-congratulation at end of cold war has given way to post-September 11 without end, further reducing importance of domestic social policy and public face of urban policy research.The still recent collapse of communism combined with contemporary retrenchments in studies may seem like a bad period in which to discuss Marxism, and failures of our meagre, but sorely missed welfare state However, this interstitial moment may actually be perfect time for Marxists to enter discussion of in United States and put class back into centre of analysis.In following paper I will discuss how discourses on have excluded and silenced a Marxist perspective, often reducing social science in general and anthropology in particular to little more than an adjunct of government policy. Then, using ethnographic data from my own research on homeless men in New York City in 1990s, I will demonstrate some of ways that this instrumentalizing of research categories and excision of Marxist understandings of social class not only removes liberating potential of social science by colluding in management of inequality, but also greatly limite explanatory power of our work. …