Poverty and perceived precarity, at their most basic level, ultimately serve to deprive folks from having time to be political subjects and having the resources to risk political actions. It’s by design. A world without extreme haves and have nots is a world that actually has to do democracy.
We did a paper on student collective action that found that students at more "elite" institutions protested more, likely because they felt they had the *right* to protest
This is one of the reasons the Black Panthers did free breakfast and community health services. They knew that if you feed people and help them live healthy lives they have more time to read, think and organize.
And I should add, this makes it all the more remarkable that our movements are so often started and led by poor and working class people. I think about Fannie Lou Hamer here a lot. They risk so much and the clarity of their positionally is far more dangerous to the status quo than any college kid.
i had a theology professor explain that when you keep a population undernourished (not “hungry” per se but weak, physically) it also depresses you, emotionally, which limits your ability to resist, in a cycle of oppression/depression. obvs i’m doing a terrible job of describing this lol
Absolutely. Here is Texas, the way poor and working people have been deprived of welfare, good wages, safe working spaces and other labor protections, health care access, it's by design to keep us from having resources, energy, health and time to do anything but work and then die
Not just politics. Paul Tough pointed out in The Inequality Machine that poorer students often drop out of college because they don’t seek the help richer students feel entitled to
Exactly—it’s the same tactics family abusers use to escape all consequences, they endlessly financially abuse so their target never has any means to hold them accountable
Everything ever written on how class exploitation deprives people of power to depose social hierarchies. We’re talking thousands if not millions of books and reports. I’m not being snarky but this is an understood fact across research on labor, inequality, education, politics and many other fields.
I guess I’d say Marx and the legions of work that has critiqued and/or extended his work including a lot of recent work on labor organizing which documents how bosses intentionally threaten workers w/ employment and benefit to prevent them organizing unions and achieving their political demands. 1/2
Recent and more mainstream examples across other fields: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law both show how racist policy was designed w/ the intent to maintain economic inequality and deprive folks of political power ranging from school boards to voting.
Sorry I said 2, but 3: see work on sharecropping, outsourcing, sweatshops, and farmworkers on how keeping people precarious is don’t intentionally to ensure a workforce that doesn’t challenge the terms of ownership and production that produce unregulated, cheap products and wealth for the wealthy.
Thanks! I've read both of those. I'd describe as making a somewhat narrower claim that the original skeet, but I think I understand where you were coming from a bit more now.
Wealthier people tend to spend more time doing politics, run for office more often, vote more often, be educated on politics more often, participate in political protests more often, volunteer and work for for political campaigns more often, give more money to political causes, across the board
That poverty deprives people of time and resources to participate in politics? That a world without such an extent of poverty leads to more democratic participation? Both of these are consistently borne out by how democracies have developed and how people within them compare in their activities
Not only are more wealthy countries more likely to become more democratic, but more wealthy people *in those countries* are more likely to participate more frequently in democratic political processes. If that’s not the point here I don’t know what is
I don’t think the “it” here is the existence of poverty. The “it” is the relationship between poverty and democratic deficits. We have designed a system where being poor inhibits your politics
working 2-3 jobs to keep above water and all the bullshit that accompanies this requires a lot of time that can’t be spent doing anything else. pretty simple and obvious point that almost seems like you have to work at to not understand.
Sarah J. Jackson, this is a PROJECT, Karl Marx, in his studies, said that the education model, in all its eras, privileged the dominant class, to the detriment of the dominated class, and that for there to be true freedom, equal EDUCATION would be necessary.
When I was an undergrad my options were education or go back to a town where you could work in a restaurant, Walmart, a chicken processing plant, etc. There is nothing wrong with those jobs. My mother worked in many of them.
