Poverty, Work, and Freedom: Political Economy and the Moral Order

by David P. Levine, S. Abu Turab Rizvi

The poor seem easy to identify: those who do not have enough money or enough of the things money can buy. This book explores a different approach to poverty, one suggested by the notion of capabilities emphasized by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In the spirit of the capabilities approach, the book argues that poverty refers not to a lack of things but to the lack of the ability to live life in a particular way. The authors argue that the poor are those who cannot live a life that is discovered and created rather than already known. Avoiding poverty, then, means having the capacity and opportunity for creative living. The authors argue that the capacity to do skilled work plays a particularly important role in creative living, and suggest that the development of the ability to do skilled work is a vital part of solving the problem of poverty.

172 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Naeem · Rating 4 out of 5]

This innovative book profoundly challenges our ideas about poverty. Poverty, Levine and Rizvi say, is “the lack of something vital in living” (129). This vitality is the “capacity and opportunity to make doing the expression of being” (129). “Making doing the expression of being” means that we don’t see ourselves as ontologically given, as fixed within a group or culture, or as reduced to some historical understanding of ongoing lifestyles. It means instead that we remain open to continually remaking ourselves. Two elements are required to obtain this goal of an ontologically open self: a “facilitating environment” and the capacity for creative work.

Creativity and creative work are at the center of this book. Our usual reference points, namely, the right to (a minimum) life, the right to income, and the right to employment are shown to be insufficient. (1) The basic needs approach to addressing poverty is rejected. Basic needs provision only a kind of bare life or some kind of cultural and historical average. (2) The authors further reject the right to income as inadequate for addressing poverty. The presence of wealth, even great wealth of the type that capitalists have, does not alleviate poverty. Why? Because poverty amidst abundance is possible if such people cannot unlock their own creative potential to remake themselves. (3) Employment is also not sufficient: “emphasis on whether work is or is not creative tends to make poverty the inability to do creative work rather than the inability to do work whose product takes on value, and therefore significance, for others” (76).

Levine and Rizvi do not oppose policy that would provide income and employment. Rather, they argue that such measures betray a real diagnosis of poverty. The following quote provides a sense of their position:

“If the goal of policy is to provide jobs without regard to the presence in them of the element of creativity in work, jobs which are, therefore, unsuitable to those with the capacity to make doing an expression of being, then the policy does not address the problem of poverty as we have defined it here. Similarly, if the goal of policy is to provide income, then policy does not even address the problem of poverty, which is that of creativity in work….If we are really to address the problem of poverty, we must take on the problems of capability and opportunity.” (93)

Properly addressing poverty means, for Levine and Rizvi, a long-term commitment to unlocking human potential for creativity. And this means providing “facilitating environments” – at the level of families and at the level of society.

Two factors impede the unfolding of creativity in human beings. First, parents define for their children what they will become. This fixes the self and undermines creative efforts to discover how the child’s self might unfold. In short, family life may not be a “facilitating environment.” Changing families to support creativity will require a long-term commitment to educational institutions and lots of patience, they say.

Second, groups and cultures which Levine and Rizvi refer to as “pre-modern” also work with fixed ontologies of the self. The authors employ a series of binaries to distinguish modern and pre-modern cultures. Modern culture, or we might say the culture of modernity, has a “special” relationship to creativity: “Since the primary characteristic of creativity is its rejection of predetermination, creativity has a special relation to modern society” (67).

Levine and Rizvi don’t mean to deny creativity in premodern cultures: “This is not to say that the individual can only be creative in those societies that consider themselves modern, or that all or most of those living in self-styled modern societies are creative in thought and conduct” (67). Rather, they highlight that “the most important part… of the idea of modernity is its rejection of predetermination of thought and conduct in custom and tradition.” (67)

Pre-modern cultures, they say, have a group life whereas modern culture stresses individual life; pre-modern cultures stress compliance whereas modern cultures allow the self to open itself up to creative possibilities; pre-modern cultures emphasize identification whereas modern cultures are based in recognition; pre-modern cultures tend towards feelings whereas modern culture is based in thought; pre-modern cultures engage the particular and the concrete whereas modern culture embrace the abstract and the universal.

In sum, pre-modern cultures are like unhealthy families, both stress “identification” over “recognition.” We can see this emphasis in the following:

“Identification shapes the earliest of our relationships, which are the relationships with our caretakers, and more broadly with our family members. These familial and familial-type bonds hold together societal and sub-societal groups based on the principle of identification and significant sameness: ethnic groups, racial groups, religious communities, and so on. Such connections are felt rather than thought, concrete rather than abstract, particular rather than universal. They are the bonds of shared ways of life, concretely considered.” (133)

Pre-modern cultures’ limits on creativity can be solved by the promotion of development, “both at the level of the individual and the level of society as a whole” (139).

Lest we misunderstand, let me clarify: Levine and Rizvi are boldly doubling down on modernity. They require greater doses of modernity as a solution to the problem of poverty -- just when some have abandoned modernity altogether and others of us are imagining various syntheses between modernity and other cultures.

If my summary of their presentation is correct then I have three reactions to this book: first, its clarification of what poverty means is a massive achievement. Their work is ground-breaking for their rejection of our usual cant on poverty and their elucidation of poverty’s historical meanings.

Second, however, I see little reason to tie this otherwise compelling and revealing analysis to a kind of glorification of modernity and denigration of non-modern cultures. What I see here are some of the worst elements of modernization theory. Is it not possible that group identity, cultural identity, and traditional identity already provide the “facilitating environment” that Levine and Rizvi call for? Therefore, is it not possible that pre-modern identities enhance creativity rather than dampened it?

Allow me to develop this point: early in the book, Levine and Rizvi critique Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs. They rightly point out that what Maslow thinks occurs in stages, “actually occur[s] concurrently” (44). Here is the fuller quote:

“Sahlins and other anthropologists … point out that hunter-gatherers had very different priorities from those suggested by Maslow. In those societies, much time was devoted to “cave painting, cosmetics, recitation, dancing ritual, and other self-expressive activities,” just the sort of things that are near the apex of Maslow’s pyramids and to which relatively little attention should be paid by people in poor societies. Such examples, which can be multiplied and made more current, suggest that a focus on basic needs, found at the base of Maslow’s pyramid, misses people’s real priorities.” (44)

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are presented as sequential and non-overlapping stages. We first satisfy our basic needs then we move to the next stage, onwards and upwards, step by step, until we get to “self-actualization.” But the anthropological literature suggests instead concurrence and overlap. We provision our aesthetic, philosophical, cultural, and biological needs all at once. Such is the evidence. But logically, also, there is no reason to employ sequential, non-overlapping categories/stages over those that concur and overlap. Is this not what the dialectical logic calls for? Similarly, if we apply this critique to Levine and Rizvi, then instead of a hard separation between pre-modernity and modernity, what we have is both at once – concurrence and overlap. In different ways, both provide enhancements for, and obstacles to, creative unfolding.

I am happy to admit that creativity might have a special role in the culture of modernity. But the pre-modern emphasis on identification -- stressed by the authors -- can also produce creativity. Grounding in culture and tradition might produce compliance and therefore undermine creativity, as the authors aver. But such grounding might also produce a confidence and security that allows explorations of otherness consistent with individual life, creativity, recognition, thought, abstraction, and universality. Levine and Rizvi do not seem to consider that so-called pre-modern cultures can provide “facilitating environments” and therefore spur creativity. Such creativity is all the more possible when humans have tasted modernity’s culture and then reached also for group/cultural/ identifications with a sense of self-consciousness about their decision.

Third, whereas Levine and Rizvi call for more modernity, I want to suggest that modernity profound achievements remain insufficient. How so? Consider the hypothesis that some and perhaps most humans cannot tolerate being merely abstract and universal beings. Why? Because the abstract and universal being is severed from nature, culture, history, and God. We also require a concreteness that comes with space/time/cultural identification, despite the tangible appeal and actual benefits of modernity, and despite modernity’s successful critique of “nature,” “culture,” “history,” and “God”. This is a return to reification after de-reification. But this time self-consciously. If so, then what Levine and Rizvi call for, namely, the extension and intensification of modernity, will unintentionally enhance the desire for group/cultural/traditional life. While modernity provides a facilitating environment for creativity it also pushes us to seek a version of that environment within group/cultural/traditional life.

I have seen this presented in Ivo Andric amazing novel, Bridge on the Drina -- specifically near the end of the book in the character Alihodja’s response the Austrian Empire’s invasion. I have seen it argued in Ali Mirsepassi’s book “Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran” (2000). And, I have sketched a version of this argument in “Gigging on the World Stage: Bossa Nova and Afrobeat after De-Reification,” Contexto Internacional, 38(2) 2016, pp. 1-21. (http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cint/v38n2/0...)

I am very grateful for Levine and Rizvi’s superb diagnosis of the problem of poverty but I suspect that their proposed solution to poverty makes us poorer. The good news is that I don’t think that their prescription follows from their diagnosis, making it easier to accept the latter and adjust the former.)