Reply to critics – Ethics & global politics book symposium on Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements

Abstract

I am grateful for these rich and probing engagements with my book. Unlike some of the audiences to whom I first presented these ideas a decade ago – who worried that treating poor people as agents might imply that they are somehow responsible to alleviate their poverty and that the affluent would consequently be let off the hook – my interlocutors in this symposium are largely sympathetic to the project. On my reading, Ackerly, Cabrera, Kolers, Lu and Vasanthakumar agree that we need a political reframing of poverty and that the moral and political agency of people living in poverty is important for poverty eradication (both normatively and practically). But they are not all convinced that poor-led social movements can deliver the solutions needed – at least not without some further building blocks. Some ask for an account of the moral duties of those living in poverty (Vasanthakumar) or acknowledgement of the normative commitments that (my defence of) a poor-led politics depends upon (Cabrera). Tensions are also noted – such as that between my use of certain terms and conceptualizations (like poor/nonpoor and global South/North) and my claim that poverty is relational and built into the structures of global capitalism. Some of the concerns and criticisms raised are ones that I would certainly take into account if a rewrite was possible; others proposed amendments I push back against because they run counter to my belief that we need to de-moralize our normative discussions of poverty – and to speak of concrete and grounded political responsibilities that arise from lived practices, rather than moral duties. All of the concerns raised in the commentaries made me think hard about different aspects of my argument, and I hope I have managed to answer most of them. Luis Cabrera argues that two sets of terms I use – ‘poor/nonpoor’ and ‘global North/global South’ – represent binaries that stand in tension with my account of poverty as an effect of relational processes of subordination and exploitation. Describing a person or community as poor or nonpoor may, it is true, portray poverty as a static condition, akin to an identity group; these terms also put