POVERTY RESEARCH, EMANCIPATORY SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND CRITICAL THINKING

The dominant perspective of the interest in poverty has been based on the intention to counteract the most extreme effects of an exclusionary development strategy that generates inequality. In other words, it is a matter of alleviating the most pathetic effects of liberal development in order to prevent conflicts and destabilizing social movements. Currently, research on poverty is dominated by classical economists who limit it within their concepts of well-being and utility (understood purely as an adjusted income scale per equivalent adult), which leaves them blind to take into account the existence of needs other than material needs, such as emotional needs, and sources of well-being other than conventional economic ones.  such as time and knowledge.

Thus, what they really care about is defining minimalist poverty lines to minimize measured poverty and maintain the status quo. By pretending that the threshold doesn't matter, they try to minimize attacks on those thresholds. A critical research perspective on poverty, on the other hand, would coincide with the one opened by Julio Boltvinik, in which poverty is part of the axis of the standard of living that constitutes the economic perspective of the axis of human flourishing.

Some important features in research on inequality

The hegemonic perspective proposes a type of development as a solution to inequality. Based on data from the end of the last century and the beginning of the present, they show that several of the countries of Latin America have experienced decreases in economic inequality measured by the Gini coefficient of household income, which is assumed as a positive result of the structural adjustment dictated by the Washington Consensus and is converted into the concept of development from international organizations such as the World Bank (WB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Marshall's classic work gave an account of a new "institutionalized social inequality" because, in describing the way in which, in today's societies, the capitalist class system has been at war with citizenship, he finds that these societies try to organize themselves to maximize the minimum level of well-being for all, finding that historically civil citizenship has developed first,  then the political and finally the social. Thus, it includes social rights such as equality of status, which refers to the recognition of citizens as holders of certain social rights for the simple fact of being citizens and shows that a minimum floor of "welfare" has been established  (education system, social services, social security, etc.), which is not necessarily low. A minimum floor that must ensure the equal status of citizens, so that it is possible to start from the assumption that class inequality is acceptable if equality of citizenship is recognized.

Cortés has proposed the notion of "equality by impoverishment" as a way of explaining the apparent trend of reducing inequality. He considers that the decrease in inequality indicators is explained by a process of increased self-exploitation by the lowest deciles, whose incomes are already so low that they resort to a series of "strategies" or emergent survival actions, but this decrease in economic inequality does not mean an improvement in terms of general well-being for the population.  or the triumph of the development model.

Erik Olin Wright (EOW) does not consider that inequality is a consequence of individual attributes (such as intelligence, education, motivation) but of the way in which the production system is organized around mechanisms of exploitation.

Finally, we face the problem of one-dimensionality in the common measurements of social inequality, by only taking into account the dimension of income, as is the case with poverty, in accordance with the hegemonic vision in this regard. Although the recognition of poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon has grown, simple methodological strategies that reduce the object of study to a single dimension (income) remain hegemonic, despite the fact that they often appear disguised as multidimensional.

Critical Research

 Critical Inquiry should be concerned with the inquiry into poverty and inequality as the first of these lines of empirical research that is possible, that is, that intellectually and socially we have the capacity to address, and that is necessary for the development of a critique of the conditions that hinder human self-realization.

Diagnosis and critique of reductionist approaches to poverty and inequality

This diagnosis and critique includes the identification of the causal processes by which institutions and social structures reproduce inequality and human suffering. If, as Julio Boltvinik affirms, the two main obstacles to human flourishing are poverty and alienation, their consideration acquires primary importance, since they are the main manifestations of the process of suffering that systematically impedes human development. Boltvinik has shown that "the concept of poverty and, therefore, its translation into measurements, is not evident". He relates that orthodox economics has developed a biased conceptualization based on income (the monetary solution, he calls it), as if it were the only source of well-being.

For this reason, it is necessary to develop based on the critical discussion of human needs and nature, which overcomes the reductionist approaches of the monetary solution, and broadens the perspective.

The biological approach formulated by Rowntree at the end of the nineteenth century conceives of "primary poverty" as the condition of people who do not have sufficient income to maintain physical efficiency. The second subsumes the concept of poverty in that of inequality. Sen points out that, despite being related, they are different problems and concepts. A third concept is that of relative deprivation, which Sen finds fruitful, and points out that it can refer to both feelings  and conditions of deprivation. He adds that both are interrelated and points out the importance of the criteria for choosing reference groups that are not, he points out, independent of political activity in the community studied, since the feeling of deprivation is linked to their expectations, to their notion of what is fair and their notion of who has the right to what. But here he introduces the position that gave rise to his important debate with Townsend by pointing out that relative deprivation cannot be the only basis of the concept of poverty, because "there is an irreducible core in our idea of poverty." The fourth concept conceives poverty as a value judgment of the observer. Sen rejects the position that poverty, like beauty, is in the eye of the perceiver, and responds that the social researcher describes existing prescriptions and that this is not an act of prescription but of description. Sen provides here another of his valuable distinctions: between the prescriptive and the descriptive. However, the observation of existing prescriptions is not obvious and the prescriptions are vague, which makes it inevitable that the researcher will complement them with well-founded value judgments. Due to the weight in the methodological training of researchers in logical positivism, in academia avoiding value judgments is the predominant position. A fifth concept, the definition of politics,  conceives poverty as that which can be combated from the political sphere.

From sociology, Peter Towsend defines poverty according to the individual's lack of resources to achieve socially accustomed patterns of life and consumption. However, in Chapter VI of this same work, Townsend (in his eagerness to define a scientific method of measuring poverty), reduces the indicators of this lifestyle to indicators that reveal the objective poverty line and adopts this as the only metric for measuring poverty.

As can be seen, the perspectives on poverty share, to a large extent, the income bias of orthodox economists protected by the postulates of classical theory. They start from the assumption that well-being (utility) is the constituent element of the standard of living, therefore, income crosses across the economists' poverty measurements, even when they make adjustments to the adjusted income scale per person or equivalent adult. All this makes its postulates endogenous.

For Márkus the constitutive element is the development of essential human forces: needs and capacities (realization of the human essence); for Maslow, the satisfaction of basic needs and self-realization (self-realization); for Fromm, the full realization of the faculties of reason, love and productive work (human birth); for Max Neef et al., the realization of fundamental human needs (quality of life); for Doyal and Gough, minimally disabled participation in their way of life (preconditions of human flourishing); for Sen, the capability set or freedom of well-being, understood as the freedom to choose between forms of life or combinations of functionings (axis of standard of living plus health).

In conclusion, the hegemonic perspectives of the study of poverty and inequality are reductionist because their vision of satisfiers is very limited (it does not take into account the subject's relationships and activities); in the same way, their vision of resources or sources of well-being only takes into account conventional economic resources and leaves out the available time and the knowledge and skills of the subject. And, above all, it is reductionist because it reduces the vision of human needs to those closest to those of animals.

At the end of the day, they could ask us: how does combating poverty and inequality bring us closer to emancipation? Our view is that: the division between means and ends is artificial; Quantitative changes determine the direction in which qualitative changes are possible. Qualitative changes are preceded by the accumulation of a series of quantitative changes. In this sense we do not pursue any kind of qualitative change, but an emancipatory qualitative change, so the meaning of quantitative changes needs to be equally emancipatory.

The meaning of the means we use in the struggle for social transformation determines the meaning or character of the transformation we are capable of achieving. A non-democratic political organization seeking a democratic transformation of the organization will likely fail in its formal objectives if it succeeds in seizing political power in society. Alleviating the effects caused by poverty and inequality allows the development of new, more developed capacities and needs, which at the same time make them possible for new transformations. Thus, adopting a broad concept of poverty is what leads us to the possibility of proposing viable alternatives in the short and medium term that, in the long term, allow and push for an emancipatory qualitative transformation.

(Máximo Jaramillo, Pável Diaz, René Jaimez)

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