Understanding Poverty in the USA

William DiFazio's Ordinary Poverty" A Little Food and Cold Storage is the starting point to discuss poverty in an America in which poverty is purposely ignored and barely discussed even in the current the presidential election. There are many failures to speak about when you are talking about poverty in the United States. There are tens of millions of people who are poor in the richest country in the world. The first and most important failure is that of the free market. It has been totally unsuccessful in eradicating the daily misery of the poor. Congress has failed as well. Welfare reform is just the application of free market capitalism to the social policy of the poor and just a continuation of the failure of the economy to develop a political remedy.

In the early 1980s, too many people were falling below that minimum quality of life as a direct result of President Reagan's policies. Advocacy emerged in this period as a mixture of well meaning religious and secular people--many who had been part of the war against poverty and many community activists--who were now forced to do something as hunger and homelessness increased. Political struggles were put on hold as people were fed and given temporary protection from the elements. In the following years as the United States became more conservative politically and no counter politics emerged these temporary and emergency measures became permanent and the advocates became bureaucrats in the organizations that they had created. Can this be changed? How can this be changed?

Class Outline:

October 6: An Introduction to Ordinary Poverty. The Liberals versus the Conservatives; the advocates versus the activists; who is right? Can the poor in the United States organize and fight-back to end poverty?

October 13: The everyday lives of poor people in New York City: an ethnography. What is the nature of the social reality of poverty and the limits of positivism and critical theory? Revisiting Moynihan’s The Negro Family and the tangle of pathology. How were the poor excluded from the economic boom of the 90s?

October 20: The Dialectic of Sr. Bernadette and the failure of advocacy. The domination of the poor by poverty bureaucracies in the age of free market capitalism: an analysis of the current situation.

October 27: The poor are not invisible but they are purposely forgotten, and willfully ignored. The impact of global, postmodern capitalism is the perpetuation of poverty. Why is there still no social movement of the poor?

November 3: Privatization and the Katrina disaster is a lesson on the limits of capitalist development as a solution to poverty. Simple struggles as the beginning of building a social movement to make poverty extraordinary: an argument.

Required Reading:

1. W. DiFazio, Ordinary Poverty: A Little Food and Cold Storage, (Temple Univ. Press).

Suggested Readings:

1. D. Wagner, The Poorhouse, (Rowman and Littlefield)

2. F. Piven and R. Cloward, Regulating the Poor, (updated), (Vintage)

3. J. Poppendieck, Sweet Charity, (Penguin)

4. C. West, Democracy Matters, (Penguin)

5. W.J. Wilson, When Work Disappears, (Vintage).

6. H. Giroux, Stormy Weather, (Paradigm).

William DiFazio teaches sociology at St. John's University and is co-host with Deena Kolbert of “City Watch” on WBAI Radio. He is author, with Stanley Aronowitz of The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work.