[lbo-talk] Race cleansing in New Orleans

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Michael P quoated:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_poverty
> In a 1998 article [1] Lewis writes:
> 
> racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very
> little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only
> their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own
> neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the
> knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between
> their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the
> world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are
> very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become
> class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they
> adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view,
> no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be
> desperately poor.

Ironically, that statement is true of the large segments of the US middle
class whose standards of living are considerably higher than those of ghetto
dwellers.  

This also brings to mind the situation in South Africa where Blacks, albeit
desperately poor and completely ignored by the apartheid welfare state
(before transition to democracy) did not succumb to "culture of poverty" but
developed a high level of self-reliance and informal support networks.  It
is not uncommon in Pretoria to see white panhandlers while blacks engage in
small-scale trade activities to support themselves.

This seems to suggest that poverty alone is not a sufficient or even
necessary condition to produce the "culture of poverty" - another ingredient
seems to be involved.  That ingredient seem to be the institution of
paternalistic clientelism - the ruling class/elite preserving the status quo
and buying social peace by patronizing and bribing the subordinate classes.
This explains why poor Blacks in South Africa did not develop "culture of
poverty" (absence of paternalistic clientelism) while the much wealthier US
middle class as well as the ghetto dwellers did (they are, after all,
clients of the US ruling elite).  

Wojtek