Concern about poverty does nothing to address real economic need

The Poor – they’re always with us. Even in these recessionary times no politician will openly side with the wealthy against the poor but that doesn’t mean the attacks won’t come. In fact, the assaults on ordinary people’s living standards are coming thick and fast, from wage cuts and freezes to growing unemployment – all while Ireland’s useless banks are bailed-out to the tune of billions of Euros. All the while, though, politicians and commentators continue to talk about the need to “safeguard the poor.”

But what, exactly, is poverty? Is a middle-class family with a huge mortgage in negative equity on a house they can’t possibly sell, poor? What about benefit claimants? Unemployed labourers? Unemployed architects? A recently qualified graduate whose job prospects have vapourised? Someone living in private rental accommodation who refuses to sell his car to pay the landlord? Someone who has seen her hours cut to part-time levels?

The recession has seen Ireland’s social and economic stratification become a topic of conversation for the first time in years, but the discourse is rather different from that of previous eras. Today we have not a working class but The Poor and the “underclass”. The Poor are decent people who deserve our sympathy while the underclass are lazy, unproductive and semi-criminal scum. Such concepts of the deserving and undeserving poor date back to the Victorian era but their reinvention for the Ireland of 2009 is more than just a return to bygone days.

Both The Poor and the underclass are moral categories, not socio-economic ones. The defining characteristics of a member of the underclass are not income, occupation or educational attainment but how he or she is viewed externally by “right-thinking people”, which in effect means judging people by means of consumption-based cultural signifiers. The Poor, meanwhile, are people who, though certainly not criminal, are incapable of taking care of themselves and therefore must be the wards of the state. This process removes their agency and offers pity in lieu of real opportunities. In addition, it also offers a layer of insulation that allows for the pushing through of further austerity measures: the truly indigent will get a hand-out but everyone else will get a hand dipping into their pockets.

One old trope is to compare income in the West with that in the Third World (laughably referred to as the “developing world” by politically correct commentators, which is strange because there is not much development going on in large amounts of it). The message is as old as the hills: you should be grateful for what you’ve got. Of course, people in the Third World are poor by any standard, objective or subjective and they clearly suffer as a result. This does not mean, however, that they should be viewed solely as passive victims or recipients of charity any more than the locally unemployed should. The indigent in far off countries are more attractive to the altruism of liberals not only because of distance or exoticism, but also because their poverty is less threatening. A person starving in Somalia is unlikely to threaten a Westerner in either individual or social terms – again this stripping of agency is part and parcel of the image of The Poor. By comparing the “underclass” unfavourably with the apparently noble poverty of others well-meaning liberals not only insult the local working class, they also transform people in the Third World into helpless and pathetic figures.

Still, it is not necessary to look outside Ireland to find this strange discourse about The Poor. Where once there was a working class, there are now several distinct categories of The Poor: social welfare recipients, the elderly and the low-waged. As if being short of money wasn’t bad enough, it is now for some reason deemed necessary to make distinctions between people who aren’t earning enough. Indeed, now we are being battered by the strange concepts of poverty relating to a lack of specific commodities: fuel poverty, food poverty – even water poverty. In each of these cases the poverty is to be ameliorated by reactive state action such as targeted allowances or tax credits rather than by a general raising of incomes, either through traditional Keynsian-inspired state handouts or by increased economic productivity – you know, creating jobs.

Ordinary bog-standard poverty, meanwhile, has been renamed ‘income poverty’.

Fighting these ‘poverties’ has taken on the characteristic of a moral crusade. Such patrician liberalism is a world away from the old socialist analysis that was once favoured. Marxism was not concerned about The Poor. Instead, for Marx, the working class was the universal class – the class in whose own self-interest also lay the need to transform society in the interests of everyone.

The key difference between both The Poor and the underclass, on the one hand, and the working class on the other, is that the working class can act – it is a political force that can make demands rather than passively accept charity.

Today’s liberalism-infused left analysis concerns itself with The Poor because it has completely abandoned its traditional working class constituency in disgust. As the post-1960s generation of leftists saw it, the working class had failed to live up to its historic mission, instead acting solely in their own self-interest. Today it is common to hear liberals complaining about people buying large television sets or greens whinging about people living in council estates driving cars, missing the point that universal liberation would include the ability to obtain whatever commodities or products one wanted. This diminished view of working people has now reached fever pitch in the anti-consumerist and anti-social behaviour narratives which view the so-called underclass as a toxic bunch of ignorant troglodytes who need to be managed by the state – a far cry from the heroic figures of the workers in whose self-interest was the liberation of all humanity.

While the poverty discourse is undoubtedly driven at least to some extent by concern for others it is a muddled and incoherent response to tough times rather than an open call for an end to austerity. Forget food and fuel poverty, the real problem in Irish politics is intellectual poverty.

Jason Walsh is a journalist – and is totally broke.