[from fwd by star.matrix]:
``...It seems safe to predict that if the resources and political opportunities that opened up twenty years ago were to emerge once again, these women and men could be organized into such effective and mean-tempered advocates that we might well need a dozen or more Green Amendments to quell their demands for social change and social justice. Were this to happen again, then the prevailing myth of the 1970s turned big lie in the 1980s could be laid to rest. That lie, now turned litany, is that the antipoverty programs were well funded, were allowed to operate for a sufficient length of time, and were free enough from parochial restraints to prove their interventionist efficacy , and that when they failed, they fell of their own weight and illogic. If we wish to test that lie, along with our resolve to create a society of equals, I wager that the poor we have encountered in these pages would be more than willing to call our hand....
...Each class subculture is, hence, that fusion of cultural strengths and weaknesses that give it its unique style and identity. Once this is realized, the entire neo-Malthusian, moralizing enterprise can be scrapped and replaced with a more correct axiom: The structure and culture of poverty, as riddled with pathology as it may or may not be, cannot be reduced to pathology. It is, instead, an assemblage of well-honed mechanisms that enable the poor to survive a class niche that would otherwise destroy them. Within the admitted, but insignificant husks of individual pathologies there is an irreducible body of adaptive cultural content that many poor persons embrace and practice. Before we ask them to jettison what they have so painstakingly forged, we might well reexamine their culture and ours and ask if we do them or ourselves any favor by demanding that they emulate us.''
Potter Addition: Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland community, David L. Harvey.
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All well and good. But like the now infinitely distant studies of the past that made essentially the same points, what is not said, what is not made explicit and what continues to be the obscuring medium to any significant change, is the absence of a profoundly antagonistic critique of neoliberal economic policies and their petty and venal political hacks in public office that together systemically produce and continue to reproduce precisely the communities and subjects of such studies.
Part of the core set of issues in such a critique, is a re-examination of the entire foundation of the political economy. Such a critique involves both its formal institutionalized mechanisms and their socio-economic justifications in political policy.
It is entirely fruitless to resurrect and refurbish some new and improved version of Johnson's war on poverty programs, without such a critique. Instead, a careful re-examination of those programs and projects, their successes and failures, will show that beyond their grossly under funded, under supported, and under implemented realities, there was a growing awareness among those involved at the time, that such programs were in effect a diversion from undertaking a practical analysis and reform of the political economy. In short, the war on poverty was mounted to stop the development of open class warfare and insurrection.
Now as much as I would love to see a new series of programs to deal with poverty, education, and community development I am under no illusions about their likely outcome. Although I would be more than happy to end my working days working in them, I also know that no matter how such programs are configured their management would never hire the likes of me or anyone else who worked in their ancient predecessors. I have already tried to re-entire the residue of those programs and been rejected tout court. But while I was attempting this re-entry I got a close look at what had become of projects I had at one time helped design, implement, and run. These had after fifteen years evolved into a castrated bureaucracy ridden pseudo-professionalism of the worst sort---a kind of smiling police-state caricature more interested in justifying itself to recalcitrant funding agencies than in working to change conditions. The two programmatic goals of program justification and systemic change had been politically manipulated to be completely antithetical to one another and had succeeded in producing an absolute stalemate. Thus the mythology that such programs were a funding black-hole had become a realistic and self-fullfiling assessment.
The deeper contradiction obscured by the otherwise laudable ideal of fomenting change from the bottom, is that the bottom is powerless and systemically excluded from and oppressed by the very socio-economic and political institutions that must be changed. So, paying the bottom to reform the top makes no sense.
What does make sense is liberating the bottom and the middle by ourselves and both together overthrowing the top. We can do that through critique and assessment of the political economy and organizing the normal processes of democratic change. Or, we can do that by any other means the fortunes of history provide. Seize the time.
Chuck Grimes