In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, many of us endured countless lectures about the failure of Democratic elites to appeal to “the working class,” the popular euphemism for white people without money. And indeed, Democrats failed in a plethora of ways. But what seems lost in these analyses, which must seem quaint in hindsight given the ways the Trumps openly exploit the office of the presidency for financial gain, are the ways that poverty is ingrained in our systems of power. We have yet to meaningfully address chronic poverty because it is part of who we are. It is the basis of our systems of governance and taxation. Generations of tax cuts subsidize the fabulous wealth of the elites we’re told to emulate. Government programs supplement the artificially low wages paid by corporations while employer theft from undocumented workers and H-2B temporary laborers facilitate corporate growth. Meanwhile, the resources of social safety net programs dwindle because of the tax-avoidance strategies of the super-rich .
If we are to meaningfully address poverty and circumvent the kleptocratic demagoguery of the Trumps, we must begin to think differently about wagelessness and exploitation. We must begin to write about the boss—to examine wealth, and not its absence, as the ill that undermines social welfare.
John Steinbeck’s attempt to capture Cannery Row as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream” reveals much of what is missing from the way we talk about poverty. For Steinbeck, work crashes ashore in Cannery Row like a wave and vanishes just as quickly. It chews up “the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks” and, in a torrent of chaos and noise, excretes them to “straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town.” When “normal life returns,” it is after this raucous chorus of work has ceased. Many of Steinbeck’s characters openly flout the wage economy—Mack and the boys come to mind—but retain ideas, aspirations, and ambitions. In their own ways, both groups—the workers and the work-less—are victims of the same system.[1]
This is what we often overlook when we write about work: people exist beyond systems of labor and exploitation. And it is not only natural that they do, but essential. Exploitative structures are not necessary or inevitable, they do not define us, and they can be rejected and overcome.
The essays in our “Poverty” issue explore the applications and limits of poverty. Regional works like Lauren Angel’s essay interpreting white Appalachian poverty accompany broader contributions by Anthony Bayani Rodriguez on the origins of food deserts and Akiyoshi Suzuki on depictions of poverty in American literature. Together, they point to enduring themes like the impact of chronic inequality or the ways that race and racism undermine the solidarity of exploited peoples to the benefit of wealthy elites. More importantly, they show that “working class” must be more than a euphemism for the white people rejected by capitalism. Instead, the words should remind us that jobs and joblessness must both be addressed before, as Steinbeck puts it, “normal life returns.”
We’ve included a working table of contents for this month below, which we’ll update weekly.
Week 1: “Poverty and Place”
- Lauren Angel explores race and racism in depictions of Appalachia in “White Appalachian Poverty in the National Mind.”
- Former lobbyist Aristotle Jones examines the tendency of wealth to create poverty in Washington D.C. in “Poverty is Synonymous with Misery.”
Week 2: “Culture, Identity, and Economic Theory”
- Akiyoshi Suzuki investigates depictions of poverty in American literature in “Cloaking the Poor: Reading and Representation in American Literature.”
- Victoria Martínez views President Trump, and American culture more broadly, through the lens of Thorstein Veblen’s economic theory in “Trump: A Pecuniary Barbarian in a New Gilded Age.”
Week 3: “Gendered and Generational Poverty”
- Yovanna Pineda examines the ways that gendered labor laws kept women in poverty in “Gendering Poverty in Labor Legislation in Argentina, 1900-1930.”
- Eric Morgenson weighs Bruce Gibney’s claims about boomer exploitation of subsequent generations in “Review: A Generation of Sociopaths.”
Week 4: “Poverty in Rural America”
- Kerri J. Malloy tells the history of Indian poverty in “Wealth Abounds: Poverty in Native America.”
- Robert Francis rethinks the culture debate and victim blaming in American views of poverty in “White Poor, Black Poor: Untangling Structure and Culture.”
- Lydia Graves, Solarize Wise Program Coordinator, shares some solutions to rural poverty in “Appalachian Voices’ “Solarize Wise” Program: Energy Savings and Job Creation Appalachia.”
Week 5: “Poverty in Urban America”
- Anthony Bayani Rodriguez looks at the roots of urban poverty and a potential solution in “Food Insecurity & the Revolutionary Democracy of Urban Food Sovereignty Struggles in the Early 21st Century.”
- Christy Hyman reflects on the ways racism makes poverty worse in “Dyeing Poverty: Thoughts on Poverty and Race.”
- Lindsay Hendrix talks with editor William Horne about her work addressing food insecurity in “Lindsay Hendrix Fights Myths to Tackle Hunger.”
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Notes
[1] John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, originally published in 1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 1-2.
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