A critique of the way powerful institutions support economics and politics that sustain poverty and keep the rich in power

Why do so many people worldwide suffer hunger and poverty when there is enough food and other resources globally to prevent it? This book shows how famine and food insecurity is an essential part of modern capitalism. Although trade, debt relief, and development initiatives are important, they do not alter the structure of the global economy and the poverty that is created by processes like privatization, trade liberalization, and market reform. Despite the rhetoric of the World Bank and the G8, high levels of poverty actually sustain western wealth and power. But there is some hope for change. Using case studies from Egypt and North Africa, Nigeria, Sudan, and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, Ray Bush illustrates that there is resistance to neoliberal policies, and that struggles over line, mining, and resources can shape real alternatives to existing globalization.

Why do so many people worldwide suffer hunger and poverty when there is enough food and other resources globally to prevent it? This book shows how famine and food insecurity is an essential part of modern capitalism. Although trade, debt relief, and development initiatives are important, they do not alter the structure of the global economy and the poverty that is created by processes like privatization, trade liberalization, and market reform. Despite the rhetoric of the World Bank and the G8, high levels of poverty actually sustain western wealth and power. But there is some hope for change. Using case studies from Egypt and North Africa, Nigeria, Sudan, and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, Ray Bush illustrates that there is resistance to neoliberal policies, and that struggles over line, mining, and resources can shape real alternatives to existing globalization.

This volume lays out the underlying logic of contemporary poverty governance in the United States. The authors argue that poverty governance has been transformed in the United States by two significant developments.

A deconstruction of the neoliberal placations about global capitalism, exposing the inequalities of global poverty “We’re making headway on global poverty,” trills Bill Gates. “Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues,” reports the World Bank. “How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years?” inquires The Economist. Seth Donnelly answers: “It didn’t!” In fact, according to Donnelly, virtually nothing about these glad tidings proclaiming plummeting global poverty rates is true. It’s just that trend-setting neoliberal experts and institutions need us to believe that global capitalism, now unfettered in the wake of the Cold War and bolstered by Information Technology, has ushered in a new phase of international human prosperity. This short book deconstructs the assumption that global poverty has fallen dramatically, and lays bare the spurious methods of poverty measurement and data on which the dominant prosperity narrative depends. Here is carefully researched documentation that global poverty—and the inequalities and misery that flourish within it—remains massive, afflicting the majority of the world’s population. Donnelly goes further to analyze just how global poverty, rather than being reduced, is actually reproduced by the imperatives of capital accumulation on a global scale. Just as the global, environmental catastrophe cannot be resolved within capitalism, rooted as it is in contemporary mechanisms of exploitation and plunder, neither can human poverty be effectively eliminated by neoliberal “advances.”

The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.

A critical analysis of the domino effect of neoliberalism and austerity on social work. Applying theory including those of Bourdieu and Wacquant to practice, it argues that social work should return to a focus on relational and community approaches.