“La povertà nell'era della globalizzazione: una genealogia dell'arte di ignorare i poveri”

The paper intends to analyse the common basis of policies aimed at contrasting poverty, in order to explain why the policies of the last decades have increased, not decreased, the gap between the richest and the poorest part of European societies. The bottom thesis is that, with liberalism, the ‘art of ignoring the poor’ has paradoxically come to rest on the idea that poverty is an essential stimulus to economic growth and well-being. This has undermined the economic foundation of the demand to combat poverty: the market itself is supposed to reduce poverty to its necessary and physiologic dimension. According to this belief the state should take responsibility for the poor on purely political grounds: states have tried to better the poor’s life conditions because they have realised that this would increase their power. Contrasting poverty has been part of the development of many techniques (firstly hygienist, lastly welfarist) of governing the population, all aimed at increasing states’ power. It is within this framework that poverty has become again an economic problem with Fordism, when the barycentre of development has shifted from production to demand and consumption. This situation has changed radically in what is usually called the age of globalisation. The political reasons for contrasting poverty have disappeared. The link between the state and a part of mankind known as its ‘people’ has dissolved: today the ‘people’ is no longer seen as a given resource whose care is the basis of state power. The market has become again the only measure of the appropriateness of policies. Even though we are ashamed to admit it, the poor are again considered a fundamental resource for development. In this context wealthy majorities, many of whose members see their well-being as threatened by the poor’s demands, have developed an excluding democracy. Democracy has inverted its historical role as the hinge of the process of social inclusion. It has become instead a means to prevent the social inclusion of new marginal people, firstly migrants, or to exclude some that were included: drug addicts, the mentally ill and the ‘undeserving poor’ of Victorian memory, who are today back into fashion.