Acting in solidarity with the poor? Some conceptual and practical challenges

ABSTRACT

Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements makes a timely, compelling, and important intervention in the philosophical literature on poverty and global justice, and improves our understanding of the nature and extent of responsibilities of variously situated agents towards the poor. Deveaux’s focus on poor-led social movements emphasizes that effective poverty reduction requires building up the collective capacities of the poor to engage in joint collective action to oppose and dismantle unjust structures. This approach politicizes poverty and provides a powerful refutation of some previous approaches that primarily formulated responses to global poverty to consist in mere charity to lighten the poor’s deprivations, or top-down solutions imposed by technocrats and other development experts. Deveaux then extends the concept of solidarity to characterize the political responsibility of the nonpoor, which consists of acting in political solidarity with poor-led organizations and movements. It is this latter move to extend the concept of solidarity to characterize poor-nonpoor cooperative activities that I question in this commentary. When the concept of solidarity, understood as identification-based joint action, is stretched to encompass cooperation between all those who may act together to resist, oppose, and dismantle the structures of domination and oppression that constitute poverty, there is the danger of obscuring the alienation and oppositional social positions that attend conditions of structural injustice. To acknowledge the limits and dilemmas of solidarity practices between the poor and nonpoor is perhaps a sober reminder of one of the major costs of living in conditions of structural injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Solidarity
• structural injustice
• poverty
• global justice
• alienation

The World Bank (2022) estimates that due to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s war against Ukraine, severe poverty is on the rise again, with nearly 700 million people, or over 9% of today’s world population, suffering in extreme poverty.¹ United Nations secretary-general António Guterres has also warned that the global poor will suffer disproportionately from the foreseeable looming negative impacts of climate change, unless there is a new ‘climate solidarity pact’ between rich countries and poorer nations (Hodgson 2022). What should be done, and by whom, to alleviate and redress the plight of the poor? Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements (2021) makes a timely, compelling, and important intervention in the philosophical literature on poverty and global justice to address these questions, and improves our understanding of the nature and extent of responsibilities of variously situated agents towards the poor.

Noting that global justice theorists have tended to dismiss the agency of the poor, Deveaux contributes to correcting this oversight by taking up the challenge of engaging in political theory in an activist mode (Ypi 2012), or ‘grounded normative theory’ (Ackerly 2018) that ‘foregrounds direct engagement with views of those engaged in political contestation (Deveaux 2021, 8). Her book contains rich analyses of a wide array of local, regional, and transnational poor-led social movements, including their interpretations of what poverty is, and the practices they have devised in their activism to combat poverty. Based on her analysis of such movements and drawing on Iris Marion Young’s work on structural injustice and homelessness in the domestic U.S. context (2011), Deveaux focuses on reconceptualizing poverty as a political problem of relational subordination in contexts of structural injustice. She thus criticizes the global justice literature for defining severe poverty apolitically as extreme deprivation, rather than as a problem of unjust and exclusionary processes and structures that deny poor people’s social and human rights. No matter how complex our measurements of poverty as various kinds of deprivation in socioeconomic well-being, Deveaux makes a forceful argument that poverty should be understood first and foremost as a relation of social subordination and injustice.

Since relations and structures of ‘subordination, social exclusion, and powerlessness are constitutive of poverty,’ Deveaux argues that the task of theorists of global justice should be to examine ‘how they can best be dismantled’ (79). Yet how theorists and practitioners go about answering this question should not reproduce the subordination of the poor, which is why acknowledging and incorporating the agency of the poor is so important to overcoming poverty as a problem of structural injustice. Deveaux thus makes the agency of the poor, through poor-led social movements, central to the normative enterprise of formulating an action-guiding theory of global justice. Not only instrumentally, but also constitutively, poor-led social movements ‘are ethically and normatively crucial to the development of a transformative, pro-poor approach to poverty eradication’ (111–2).

The bulk of Deveaux’s book is devoted to showing that poor-led social movements have been at the forefront of taking up this task in practice, innovating forms of collective action to improve the well-being of the poor, as well as to challenge and change the structures of politics, economics, and society that produce their marginalization, exploitation, subordination, and oppression, and domination. Through an examination of cases such as Brazil’s rural landless peasant movement – the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) – Deveaux argues that such movements aim to counter the powerlessness of the social position of the poor by building collective capabilities for solidarity among those who are oppressed, which requires politicizing the problem of poverty through critical consciousness-raising practices that motivate the poor’s engagement in various forms of direct and collective political action. In the conclusion of the book, Deveaux then extends the concept of solidarity to characterize the political responsibility of the nonpoor, which consists of acting in political solidarity with poor-led organizations and movements. It is this latter move to extend the concept of solidarity to characterize poor-nonpoor cooperative activities that I will question in this commentary.

I agree wholeheartedly with Deveaux’s account of poverty as constituted by structural forms of subordination and injustice, and that ‘only sustained, collective political action by individuals working together in social movements can transform complex and pervasive systems of discrimination, subordination, and exploitation that prevent people from claiming their social entitlements’ (200). While Deveaux builds her account on Young’s conception of political responsibility for structural injustice, her innovation is to characterize the nature of the collective action required as a form of solidarity. I am convinced that this is the right concept to articulate the political responsibility of the poor and those who suffer from structural oppression. How can global poverty be eradicated? The answer is: the poor of the world unite!

Deveaux’s conception of solidarity relies on a combination of theories of solidarity forwarded by Sally Scholz (2008), Andrea Sangiovanni (2015) and Avery Kolers (2016). Solidarity is a form of joint collective action between agents who share some basis of identification (Sangiovanni 2023 forthcoming), though Deveaux argues that such identification is not natural, or reducible to interests, conditions, or ascriptive traits, and must be constructed and cultivated. Poor-led social movements need to construct a collective identity to establish solidarity among social movement members. Although the basis of the collective identity varies depending on the histories of communities of struggle and their contemporary challenges, similar experiences of oppression and burdens can be a source for the shared identification or mutual affinity that grounds solidaristic action. Deveaux notes, for example, that the collective identity of members of the MST ‘is mainly grounded in the shared experience (among landless farmers and workers) of dispossession and exploitation’, as well as in an ‘alternate vision of rural citizenship’ (125). Poor-led movements must also cultivate a ‘shared interpretation of common experiences of oppression – as landless rural workers, disenfranchised residents of an urban slum, precarious workers in an exploitative industry, or precarious workers in the informal economy’, and through organization and mobilization, clarify how the movement’s values and aims motivate and sustain its members’ interests in trying to change particular social structures and relations (195).

Focusing on solidarity-building among the poor as a necessary, though insufficient, ingredient in the fight against poverty helpfully brings local and national structures back into debates about global justice. At the same time, under contemporary capitalist conditions, solidary anti-poverty groups are potentially quite large and likely transnational. Since some sources of oppression are global and transnational, the collective political identity that grounds the solidarity of poor-led movements can be transnational in contexts of globalization, giving rise to transnational networks of the poor, such as SDI (Slum Dwellers International), La Via Campesina, SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association in India), and WIEGO (Women in informal employment, globalizing and organizing). Deveaux’s book provides a compelling case for why poor-led social movements are necessary to eradicate poverty, and should lead a new generation of global justice scholars to theorize how such movements can foster solidarity and empowerment of the poor to dismantle structural injustice.

Deveaux’s focus on poor-led social movements emphasizes that effective poverty reduction requires building up the collective capacities of the poor to engage in joint collective action to oppose and dismantle unjust structures. This approach politicizes poverty and provides a powerful refutation of some previous approaches that primarily formulated responses to global poverty to consist in mere charity to lighten the poor’s deprivations, or top-down solutions imposed by technocrats and other development experts.

Deveaux devotes the last chapter of her book to the question that has occupied global justice theorists: what can the nonpoor do? I am persuaded by Deveaux’s argument that the political responsibility of the nonpoor is to play a supporting role in assisting poor-led social movements’ struggles to empower and create solidarity among the poor. Her conception of this political responsibility relies on Young’s formulation: ‘Being responsible in relation to structural injustice means that one has an obligation to join with others who share that responsibility in order to transform the structural processes to make their outcomes less unjust’ (Young 2011, 96–7). Deveaux argues that the redress of global poverty entails a political responsibility to act in solidarity with the poor: a ‘poor-led approach to poverty reduction can best be advanced when differently situated people recognize and take up a political responsibility for solidarity with poor-led organizations and social movements’ (2021, 192). This entails that privileged allies act ‘in accordance with norms of mutuality, deference, deep listening, and a willingness to share the burdens and risks of collective action’ (207).

One virtue of formulating the political responsibility of the nonpoor as consisting in solidarity with the poor is that it entails acknowledging the agency of the poor. However the nonpoor may assist and support the poor, framing their/our actions as solidarity highlights that joint action is required, and one can only engage in joint action with those others who are recognized as agents, rather than just passive recipients of aid. For the nonpoor to engage in solidarity with the poor is to commit to joint action based on respect for the dignity of the poor as agents of their own emancipation. In a similar vein, Deveaux notes that acting in solidarity with the poor ‘excludes situations in which a would-be ally acts on behalf of a group (or individuals) suffering injustice’ (203); thus framing the nonpoor’s political responsibility as a matter of solidarity, understood as a form of joint action, serves as a conceptual bulwark against the potential of nonpoor outsiders to co-opt or control social movements in distorting and dominating ways (205).

While these virtues of characterizing the political responsibility of the nonpoor towards the global poor as a form of solidarity are great, there are some unique pitfalls in employing the language of solidarity to conceptualize poor-nonpoor forms of cooperation in existing contexts of structural injustice. Although I share Deveaux’s concerns to formulate the responsibility of the nonpoor in a way that respects the agency of the poor, persistent problems with practices of solidarity in various social justice struggles have led to recognition of the need to decolonize solidarity, including more acknowledgement of dilemmas that those whose social positions may be oppositional encounter in attempting to engage in solidaristic action to resist injustice (Land 2015).

When the concept of solidarity, understood as identification-based joint action, is stretched to encompass cooperation between all those who may act together to resist, oppose, and dismantle the structures of domination and oppression that constitute poverty, there is the danger of obscuring the alienation and oppositional social positions that attend conditions of structural injustice. Calling the support and assistance of the nonpoor or privileged a form of solidarity with the poor could generate a form of misappropriation of identification with the poor. The criterion of shared identification or shared fate that distinguish solidarity from mere cooperation points to relations of mutuality among groups, but a constitutive feature of structural injustice seems to be hierarchies of mutual alienation.

Thus, I agree with Deveaux that ‘outsiders can and should act as allies with poor-led groups and movements, supporting their struggles in concrete ways’ (206). She is also certainly right that poor-led social movements need nonpoor allies to make progress on dismantling structural oppression and domination: outsiders can assist poor-led movements by ‘exposing and opposing efforts by governments and corporations to discredit, weaken, sabotage, or repress such movements’ (208). The nonpoor, however, can support poor-led social movements, without presupposing any shared identification or shared fate, aspects of mutuality that are stymied in conditions of pervasive structural injustice. Supporters of the poor may endorse the cause of dismantling the social structures that oppress the poor, without claiming to share an identification with the poor or their fate.

In contexts of structural injustice, it is also not clear that everyone can engage in solidaristic collective action with the poor. Solidarity presumes that the agents engaged in joint action are not liable for the structural domination or oppression that produces the poor’s subordination. Can those who are liable for the poor’s subordination engage in solidaristic action with the poor? For example, if wealthy landlords make political concessions to organizations representing the interests of landless peasants, their actions may not be appropriately described as solidaristic with the poor, even though they may be most consequential for empowering landless peasants. The diagnosis of poverty as structural domination and oppression implies that there are groups that dominate and oppress, as well as groups that are dominated and oppressed; given these oppositional social positions, not all participants within an unjust social structure can engage in solidaristic action. Although part of the goal of social struggle is to break down alienating or oppositional social positions that stymy collective action to dismantle structural injustice, it is an inherent risk in contexts of structural domination that using the language of solidarity to characterize poor-nonpoor cooperation can imply that the aspiration of structural transformation has been achieved.

Even if we put dominators and oppressors aside, it is not clear that solidaristic action is feasible between the poor and their privileged nonpoor supporters. Some might argue that the lack of basis for a shared fate, and therefore solidarity, between the poor and nonpoor, is apparent when considering another feature that Deveaux finds essential for solidaristic action: she argues that solidaristic joint action ‘entails a sharing of the risks and burdens of political struggle’ (205). As Sangiovanni put it, solidarity consists in being ‘disposed (a) to incur significant costs to realize our goal; and (b) to share one another’s fates in ways relevant to the shared goal’ (343). Deveaux argues that contextual factors are involved in determining the precise risks and burdens involved, but solidarity with the poor cannot be merely symbolic and requires allies in more privileged social positions than the poor ‘to take steps to divest of (or redirect) privileges they enjoy by virtue of their social location within manifestly unjust social structures, in contexts where others are denied them’ (206). If the idea of sharing risks and burdens is to approximate a condition of shared fate as a basis of solidarity, however, can the privileged really share the burdens and risks of collective action to the same extent as the poor? Or how can the privileged possibly share proportionally similar burdens/risks to the poor? For solidarity to be meaningful, do the privileged need to forego access to good schools for their children, adequate health care, or higher life expectancy?

While I am sympathetic to this criteria for conceptualizing solidarity, specifying further what would constitute adequate proportionate burdens or risks could be helpful for providing a more critical account of how some contemporary expressions of solidarity with the poor are lacking, as well as lead to different kinds of normative and political work that the nonpoor need to be doing, even before attempting to engage in coalitions with poor-led social movements (Dabiri 2021). For example, a common problem encountered by social movements is the ‘coming and going’ of privileged supporters, whose privilege partly consists in being able to ignore or disengage from social movement campaigns (Land 2015, 166–7). One way to specify a concrete burden and risk of solidarity would be to highlight the requirement of a long-term commitment to be engaged with a poor-led social movement. In a way, such a requirement on the nonpoor’s engagement with the poor emphasizes that redressing poverty entails redressing a social relation of subordination and marginalization.

Another burden or risk of solidarity is to reckon with one’s own complicity, rather than just political responsibility to dismantle the structures that oppress the poor. Deveaux seems to argue that the basis of shared identification that could ground solidarity between the poor and nonpoor is the acknowledgement of the unjust social structure that includes the social positions of domination, privilege, disadvantage, and deprivation. Solidarity then may be possible to the extent that the dominating and/or privileged nonpoor acknowledge how the social structures that sustain their domination/privilege are the ones that also produce the oppression/subordination of the poor. This shared identification with the struggle to dismantle structural domination, however, is predicated on acknowledging the complicity of the nonpoor, and may make it even harder for solidarity between the poor and nonpoor in conditions of structural injustice to resemble the solidarity among the poor. In the case of the nonpoor’s experience of solidarity, it is not likely to produce a warm fellow-feeling, or the empowering sense of dignity that solidarity among the poor or oppressed may engender. Rather, the marker of the nonpoor’s solidarity with the poor could be a forthright acknowledgement of complicity, and the accompanying pain of being burdened, albeit in different ways, by structural injustice. Perhaps one way to understand this burden for the nonpoor is in the change of self-perception that it would produce. For example, to identify with the poor and their struggles may require imagining myself as a beneficiary of global and domestic social structures that produce their subordination, and giving up my self-image as a hard-working person whose gains are largely attributable to my own ambitions and efforts (Lu 2023 forthcoming). Shared acknowledgement of structural injustice and one’s privilege in the structure may motivate the nonpoor to engage in joint actions that support poor-led social movements, but what seems to make the action solidaristic is primarily the attitude of contrition.

If we use the concept of solidarity to capture all of the forms of collective action from differently situated individuals and groups required to dismantle structural injustice, it may be difficult to capture the different kinds of work that the nonpoor may need to do, in order to engage effectively with poor-led social movements in joint forms of action. The moral and political responsibility of the nonpoor may be to support the realization of solidarity and empowerment among the oppressed or poor. But playing a role in fostering or supporting the building of solidarity among the oppressed does not itself constitute solidarity with the poor. There may be limits to the solidarity practices of those not in the primary solidary group, based on the limits in their capacity for sharing the experiences, circumstances, and fate of those in the primary solidary group. To acknowledge the limits and dilemmas of solidarity practices between the poor and nonpoor is perhaps a sober reminder of one of the major costs of living in conditions of structural injustice. In our present conditions of structural injustice, when both calls and claims of solidarity are ubiquitous, theorizing collective action between the poor and nonpoor as solidarity may inadvertently obscure the nature and depth of structural injustice, and its destructive consequences for solidaristic politics.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung [Bessel Award].

Notes

¹ The World Bank (2022) considers people to be living in extreme poverty if they live on less than $2.15 per person per day at 2017 purchasing power parity. See also the World Food Programme (2023).