Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century by Alyosha Goldstein (review)

American Studies scholar Alyosha Goldstein’s Poverty in Common is an eloquent contribution to a vast literature that seeks to explain the persistence and spread of poverty at the heart of the most affluent nation on earth. Goldstein does a fine job of conveying from the opening pages that poverty in America is no paradox of liberal democracy and capitalist economy, but rather a direct product of those: over the long term, including in the Johnson administration’s 1960s War on Poverty that is at the centre of the book, the neoliberal state has worked to empty poverty of its “incriminating political contexts.” (11) Government, academics, and many community organizations, envisioning poverty as an aberration rather than “a requisite for capitalism” (10), have sought to mitigate poverty’s effects while rarely addressing its roots in the belly of the beast. Goldstein attends not only to the tensions inherent in anti-poverty initiatives blinkered to the causes of inequality, but to the fissures that developed when locally generated campaigns actually took aim at those causes.

Goldstein’s focus is the Community Action Program that was a central feature of the War on Poverty. He does a wonderful job of elucidating the connection between domestic policy aimed at incorporating “the poor” into the body politic and international policy to win over worryingly non-aligned states in the South. The project, in both instances, was to elaborate a politics of belonging that neutralized the grievances of the marginalized and ensured their attachment to liberal democracy. The articulation of poverty as foreign and provisional was not just about delineating boundaries between the domestic and the alien, but was “integral to the dynamics of liberal reform.” (78) Goldstein’s case studies are rooted in the 1960s – the Peace Corps plays a key role in the chapter on “underdevelopment” – but his reflections are just as applicable to the World Bank’s recent turn to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers as a new and gentler form of structural adjustment. This strategy, like Community Action, aims at nurturing links between local communities and national and global institutions of governance. The South, like the community organizations under study here, is to be kept squarely in the neoliberal fold.

A real virtue of the book, particularly for those who are not students of the US, is Goldstein’s careful integration of US foreign policy imperatives with its domestic policy bent. As he puts it, the book “foregrounds the concurrently local, national, and global terms” (25) through which poverty was constructed as a field for political action – poverty as a rationale for community action, a category for governance and for contestation within and against mid-20th-century liberalism. As a colonial historian with interests in the challenges of “development” in the global South I found myself reading passages on American domestic politics with an eye to their wider implications; most of the time Goldstein then obliged by drawing out those implications himself. For instance, in an illuminating discussion of the complex valence of “self-help” ideology, he points to its genesis in 18th-century commitments to the rational, self-actualizing individual; its role in cementing expectations of individual work ethic and independent effort (or of their supposed lack in racialized others); and its utility in denigrating its opposite, dependency. He ends by underscoring the way the “mystifications of self-help” (21) deluded dependency theorists in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s into thinking national autonomy and economic development were possible without profound change to the workings of modern capitalism.

The first chapter traces the emergence of “community” as a strategy for governing the poor, and the ascendance in the Cold War era of the community development model with its emphasis on teaching self-reliance and possessive individualism while blunting dissent in impoverished communities like those of urban Puerto Rico. The second chapter, about which I say more below, examines the growing association between poverty and foreignness in the Cold War...