On the marginalization of poor people’s politics

written by Sid (Kim) Jackson, October 25, 2023 (3700 wds)

Much to my own surprise, I’ve decided to start a blog.

I have recently finished a long period of time spent in academia. Since I was a young adult, I have been active in various dimensions of the anti-colonial-capitalist struggle. It was around 2008 when I became a part of a poor people’s community in the west Toronto neighbourhood called The Junction where I was living and working. At that time, poor people were facing the onset of gentrification. Now, with gentrification in full flight and facing a condo building boom, the community has been dramatically reduced. But we are still here. Through academia I was able to fund my arts and activist engagement with specific sites of poor people’s inhabitation: a shelter, social housing, low barrier rentals, and a park that sits in the heart of the community. This work culminated in a PhD (2020) dissertation with the hilariously wordy title: Mending and Transforming the Torn Social Fabric: Lumpen Social Reproduction in Settler Urban Space as Relational Praxis Art (ugh, I meant every word of it!). Out of critical discussions I was having in community where unhoused community members compared the shelter to prison, I decided to do a Post Doc (2022) that looked at those punitive neoliberal institutions of ‘care’ that frame, contain, and discipline poor peoples lives. My Post-Doc project was called: From Prison to Shelters: Resisting the Carceral Continuum.

Prior to having accessed a high degree of education, I mainly survived working across a spectrum of manual labour jobs including union shops, labour co-operatives, as well as some very informal workplaces. My work experience gives me a natural solidarity with working-class struggles. However, I also grew up and have been relatively poor my whole life. I have been insecurely housed. I have squatted. I have been deep into drug culture to various degrees throughout my life, and I have offset my poverty with lumpen (criminalized) economic practices. I find community among others who are poor, quite often more poor, or differently poor, than myself. I have worked closely with poor, criminalized, and unhoused people for my whole adult life. I work and write from a distinct poor people’s perspective, from a desire to see poor people’s political identity conceptualized and established as an historical force, like the working-class and the other important identity categories. I argue that a poor people’s perspective is distinct and even in contradiction to that of the working class. I would like to see poor people’s political identity take space in activist, public, even academic discourse.

I went into academia expecting to become part of a community of radical thinkers hoping to bring a poor people’s critique to bear on other current issues being discussed. But that wasn’t my experience.

While I have received positive feedback and funding within the academic setting, I have experienced little actual uptake and engagement from my peers such that my work would garner broader reception. I’m not sure of all the reasons why — maybe wishing for academic community within a highly competitive industry is an idealization. Instead I ran into structures of privileged access and sociality, both overt and tacit, that, as a poor person, have felt arcane. And lets not forget, the university is NOT a meritocracy. While my sense was that the university is, in general, accessible to a broad range of people, there was still a set path or unwritten agreements by which you would gain the support of your supervisors, prof’s and peers, for inclusion in discussion groups, co-publishing, and conference panels: those relations and activities that bring ‘success,’ by which I mean recognition that garners connections and thus, further resourcing. My work was well received in terms of grades and not being required to do much, if any, re-writing, but I did not experience any of this support or engagement, except from one supervisor, nancy viva davis halifax. nancy works in critical disability studies and is a bit of an outsider herself due to her unwavering attention to how individuals, especially those who are disabled, experience the institution. I deeply appreciate nancy for her dedication to collegiality. She showed up to co-publish, co-present, involved me in research projects, and directed various opportunities my way. This was partly based in the fact that we had an established relationship prior to her being one of my supervisors and had worked together on an arts based project at a shelter for women local to where we both lived. We were already in community together and shared a sense that we were in ‘the struggle’ which eclipsed the competitiveness and mutual ambition for scant teaching positions and funding that so often drives academic relations. Aside from my collaboration with nancy, I was left alone to do my academic projects which were grounded in arts and activist work with poor people’s community.

In academia, the desire for a critical space that addresses the historical issues we face as a society and a global collectivity conflicts with how academic power/knowledge is produced to protect academics as a class and as individuals.

It is also true that, coming from a poor background and having had a somewhat checkered life such that it was a surprise to myself and many others that I ended up doing a PhD at all, that my perspectives on academia are highly critical. As someone grounded in my own poor people’s activist perspective, I have never believed that academics held the keys to the future in any way that could be considered positive for poor people. I cannot accept that left academics are the thinkers of the revolution. I did, and continue think that, as academics and people with other kinds of cultrual capital (I would include artists and activists here), we should be involved in a deep process of reflexive critique. Especially since the university is well understood historically to be a site of class exclusivity and white colonial domination that ‘outside’ voices have had to challenge in order to create hope for its radicalization: queer, Black, Indigenous, disabled peoples and women have all critically challenged and changed the university in important and historical ways. Some of these changes are reflected in the fact that we can now tick the boxes of the various identities we hold that should receive affirmative consideration in order to re-balance how power is embodied in the institution (see my ‘about’ page to read my positional self-reflections). And yet, working-class is not a box, let alone being poor.

In a capitalist society based on class exploitation and the creation of an intersectional poor non-class, exclusion based on economic status is a glaring contradiction and can only mean that the university will do more to integrate ‘Othered’ identities into class privilege, thereby upholding the class structure, rather than undo the class privileging role of the institution itself by embracing critiques from it’s economic Others.

I believe that taking up a poor people’s analytic lens which is necessarily critical of Academia as a privilege generating institution, may have had something to do with my being alienated from the academic community. Class analysis (as separate from classed bodies) does have some traction in those departments or classes that have a marxist orientation. Some working class families work exceedingly hard to get to a place where their kids can obtain higher education and am I also am aware of some poor people who get into the university. I know of students to be unhoused at times, or who were formerly unhoused. In society under the Canadian state, having a university degree is a prerequisite for middle-class employment, so there are a lot of people going into debt and scraping resources together to achieve this economic advantage. I also know of programs such as Walls To Bridges which is stewarded by formerly incarcerated people to train professors to teach in the prison. Some of those students from inside have established academic careers on the outside. My dear friend and collaborator, Kirsten McIlveen has been doing incredibly important work organizing credited university courses and teaching in the Fraser Valley Institute for Women, as well as supporting her former inside students to teach, not just classes, but now also co-teaching whole courses at Capilano University. The work of breaking down the barriers between academia and poor peoples epistemologies is of vital importance. And even so, while there are a few liberal research groups like the Homeless Hub, to my knowledge there are no critical anti-poverty studies departments, or research groups in the academic landscape. There is little to no acknowledgement of the unique and indispensable perspectives that arise from social locations of impoverishment, or from poor bodies themselves or of the radical significance of allowing issues of accessibility (economic and from a disability lens) to have a transformative impact on institutions.

At a Historical Materialism conference held at York some years back, Himani Bannerji commented (I assume in response to a conversation that was happening about community inclusion in the conference) that it would just be cruel to expect poor and marginalized people to be able to participate in such a setting. And she is undoubtably right, but is that an excuse to keep on in accord with the exclusionary power of the settler-bourgeois regime of power/knowledge which dominates the lower and non classes? At the same time, when subjugated or subaltern bodies or, lets say, organic intellectuals, enter into the milieu of settler-bourgeois knowledge/power, there is a negotiation between allowing oneself to be tokenized and/or becoming ‘like them’ to succeed vs. holding onto the knowledge of ones experiential positionality.

Throughout my time in academia, I have tried with my peers and students to encourage that we ground ourselves in our lived experience, social identity and location as a source of our own socially loaded empirical knowledge to which we can apply historical and political analysis, engage in group discussion across difference while noticing who is not present, so we can arrive at a place of critical thinking from which we can begin to see ourselves in dialectical relation to each other. This is how we learn together.

However, students and peers alike have balked at this suggestion, rather striving for dominant abstracted and disembodied relations to their subject matter and each other, for virtuosity, analytical distance: eschewing accountability in order to access the possible privileges that being an academic brings. This is a persistent and normative mode of knowledge production which is bourgeois, white, settler, hetero-patriarchal and ablist. And no matter what critical perspective you arrive to the university with, this knowledge structure contains and constrains the radicality of your work.

At this same Historical Materialism conference, I was in a conversation with some peers where an individual who identified as coming from a working-class Asian background commented that since advancing in their marxist studies they can no longer identify with where they come from or relate to their old friends and family. This is a phenomenon that Gramsci commented on in his discussion of praxis: the eventual disassociation of the academic from real life, and their initiation into a relatively elite or privileged milieu divorced from the people. A very contradictory comment since Marx beseeched us to look into the hidden abode of production: the actual lives lived under oppression.

We don’t live in a society with free education although we could. Instead, addressing economic and other accessibility barriers that poor people face to accessing education collide with the privileging machine by which the academia operate. You are wealthy because you are good and smart and thus, should gain further privilege vs. you are poor and thus must lack intelligence or have unsurmountable problems and thus, you should be the objects of study and charity. Gaining privilege and falling into poverty are both exponential trajectories but in opposite directions.

And, what would it mean to have a box to tick on your application forms for if you are working or non-class? Well, if one is queer, gender non-conforming, a woman, an Indigenous, Black, or disabled person, one’s perspectives and investments have become valorized and reflected in departments dedicated to the study of socio-historical and political conditions that relate to your embodied lived experience within structural hierarchization of bodies. This valorization doesn’t mean that the institution or people within it become receptive, it just means there is a bit of ground on which to fight to build further critical interventions. And while poverty is deeply intersectional and constitutes an experience that many non-white, disabled, queer and gender-non conforming people carry, does this mean the poverty perspective can be adequately represented through the theorization of these identities? In my personal experience - the answer to this is no. Poverty remains a place of stigmatization, shame and trauma that people who have that experience often want to move away from in terms of economic reality, identity, and as a basis for critical intervention. Thus, without the support of an actual critical poverty program, or political discourse, there is little self-generated representation of poor people’s experience, issues, theory, and transformative potential, let alone the accessibility needs to be able to even enter such a space as the university — as Bannerji remarked: including poor people in marxist academic spaces would be harmful to them.

With rare exception, poor people are researched and written about while consigned to the violence of the charity structure and the carceral spaces of the welfare state. Beyond the issue of who is representing who in the power/knowledge system of academia, there is the question of the relationship of academia to poor people’s community to begin with. Here, I will note the stand out contribution of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons whose mandate is to publish incarcerated people’s writing among articles by academics. It’s a vital and historical resource. Nevertheless, writers from marginalized locations rarely manage to accrue any cultural or actual capital for their work. I will be writing more extensively about the relation of poor people to the power/knowledge structure in future posts. But for now, I will say, the academic industry has been slow to change the extractive research methods characterized by short term research projects or field work which result in academic products that circulate within a knowledge economy away from those who contributed their lived expertise to the research. Let alone the constraints on paying research participants by academic ethics boards and granting agencies. The economic extraction here is acutely felt by poor people. In response to this structural problem, there have been important critiques offered, for example, by Indigenous theorists (Linda Tuhiwai-Smith), but also by those representing marginalized community such as the Toronto sex-worker advocacy group, Maggies, and by various organizations that work in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. But even these critiques are towards reforms to solve academic abuse in their communities, but do not address the class functioning of the university itself and its complex relation to those who are studied.

The contradictions between poor people’s political identity and their representation within a settler-bourgeois class structure cannot be undone in these times of advanced neoliberalism (or just good ol’ capitalism) where the logic of competitive privilege intensifies under the rule of profit and the scarcity it produces. In fact, the poor-bashing that limits poor people’s accessibility to knowledge/power gets to the heart of the matter: money is the ultimate tool of valorization and it only really valorizes itself. Any thought that occurs within the sanctum of neoliberal academia is circumscribed and de-limited by this reality. Our radical work greenwashes the exclusionary power of academia.

You can critique, but you won’t get far if you expect that critique to actually result in transformation. For myself, I choose to remain on the front of poor people’s struggles, and thus have remained poor myself.

While the university has not generated a critical ‘poor peoples studies’ stream or research body, there is a distinct history of poor people’s organizing which persists today. However, unlike ‘disability’ which has become a validated identity against a history of stigmatization, the word ‘poor’ is so stigmatizing that it has not been recuperated or re-appropriated (unlike the terms ‘crip’, ‘queer’, ‘slut’). To identify as a poor person is to invite pity, revulsion, suspicion, and exclusion and no one wants that. In my understanding, overcoming stigmatization to achieve validity as a social group within colonial-capitalism is equivalent to obtaining class standing while poor people remain on the outside — as poor people. A radicality that is exclusive of poor bodies fails in its stated project.

In order to develop an assertive poor people’s politics I have taken up, in an attempt to re-signify, the marxist term, lumpenproletariat* (of which I will write about more thoroughly in later posts). I assert that Marx and Engels were very, very wrong to not theorize the poor separate from the working class. Poverty is a direct outcome of colonial-capitalism and yet poor people are framed overtly or covertly by a grab bag of bigoted and highly stigmatizing stereotypes: as morally corrupt, dirty, ignorant, criminal, untrustworthy, as problem, and even as the enemies of the revolution. It’s pretty appalling.

In my view, a proper theory of the lumpen should be developed. The term could be recuperated and rehabilitated to stand in for a poor people’s political economy and resistance that would be the basis for a lumpen engagement in a transformed future. After all, aren’t the poor the ultimate victims of a poverty producing colonial-capitalism? Don’t we understand that poverty is an intersectional experience within a colonial-capitalist system - or racial capitalism if you prefer? And how can a revolutionary program that doesn’t account for the poor, their distinct critical knowledge and perspectives, lived experience, their needs and desires, their culture and politics, be truly inclusively liberatory?

While we seek to diversify and enact principles of inclusion in our radical spaces, why does this not include poor people? To deny poor people a protected and supported place in the struggle is ironic to say the least. This perspective that comes through a poor people’s lens has not gained any traction within academia and nor has the recuperation of the term lumpen. I understand, it’s a big shift to make. I hope readers will hear me out on this.

Ultimately, the inclusion of poor people’s realities and perspectives is a question of praxis. The term praxis is used much too loosely today having lost its meaning and acutal revolutionary grounding. However, Gramsci’s discussion of praxis gives us a lot to work with in terms of why a political integration of oppressed peoples is necessary, how addressing knowledge production is a key issue, and how this integration can move us towards a revolutionary movement. Praxis is definitely a topic I will be writing more about as I work to update the theory for a poor people’s political context.

Finally, I am doing this blog because I feel that the procedural, formal, and ideological gate keeping by established academic journals hinders the acceptance of work from the lens of a poor people’s praxis. Instead of unfamiliar theoretical perspectives being intriguing on their own terms, they seem to illicit the desire to make them familiar. Being a c-ptsd survivor, having resulting mental health challenges and neuro-divergence (thus the inconsistent grammar), and being a creative makes trying to conform to current academic/publishing standards a deep strain. My brain is usually going in a million directions at once - like a pin ball bouncing between dynamic historical forces and their specific impacts on the everyday, on top of facing all the challenges of doing unpaid and crisis filled activist work on the front lines of the Toronto shelter system. In my lived experience, I balk at abstract and disembodied standards, these expectations to conform to someone else’s criteria, agenda, timeline, and word count. Out of all the labour I do, this is the most draining.

The normativity of academia, left publishing (and granting agencies too) has killed the desire and joy I have for writing. Mostly, it makes me feel incredibly sad and hopeless that the radical cultural class consists of a bunch of hoops to jump through rather than building a community that I can contribute to in a real way as a full human being committed to radical transformation with a distinct perspective.

And maybe that is too much to expect when all of us are taken up trying to succeed at our goals within colonial-capitalism: jetting off to conferences and distant sites of struggle, accessing structures of cultural capital, building one’s cv, getting funding and jobs, buying a home, doing all the middle-class things to generate and protect livelihoods at the same time as thinking revolution (any contradiction here?).

I recognize the importance of economic stability for peoples who have experienced structural oppression and disenfranchisement. But we also need to keep track of the contradictions. bell hooks and Frantz Fanon both wrote about the dangerous effects of classism within liberatory movements. For myself, I grew up poor, I have not achieved (or wanted) middle-class stability, I don’t need a lot of money, but I do need community and I need support to continue to do this work as a poor person working in a poor people’s community.

It is in an effort to maintain my well-being and the integrity of my work, and to free up my creative and thought processes that I embark on this writing project. I will talk about poverty and the lumpen, about praxis, trauma and disability, about the lumpen in a time of climate chaos, gender identity, the eugenics of advanced neoliberalism, looming fascism, and the carceral continuum. I will talk about poor people’s activism and art, community building, and unpaid v. paid activism. I will talk about the ideas I come across in readings and other types of work that I think are important to our current time, about freedom and prefiguring a future freedom we try to enact now, and more - all from a poor persons lens.

Welcome, I hope some of what I have to offer resonates. There is never a more urgent time for us to be in conversation towards maintaining all the fronts of the struggle, and opening new ones.

*I don’t actually agree with Kathi Weeks conclusions on the lumpenproletariat but she does provide a good overview of the lit and some useful analysis.