| This is a study of lives on the margins of the political economy in Springfield, Massachusetts: poor people, who are increasingly dispensable to capital, and elites who have lost control of local capital. Rather than seeing poor people and elites as passive victims of forces beyond their control, I see them as political actors engaged in collective action to change their worlds. I am interested in how they experience, understand and respond to the systemic forces that are changing their lives. Exploring the dialectic between system and agency, I focus my research on organizations engaged in collective action: a membership-controlled poor people's organization, a committee for community planning and development of the local United Way, and a community foundation, directed by the city's leading philanthropists and business owners.;Connecting the lives of the powerful with the lives of the powerless, I create an understanding of their interrelationship and interdependencies. In this analysis, I build on poor people's critical knowledge and counter-hegemonic conceptions of the world which are implicit in their activity. I do not examine the violence of poor people, but the violence of poverty. I am less interested in why people are homeless than in how homelessness is allowed to happen. I show how poor people become dependent on "the system" as clients of welfare and social services; but I also show that the system is dependent on the continued existence of poor people, their needs and deficiencies. I argue that poor people struggling collectively for systemic changes to ensure their own survival, must also carry out an unceasing cultural struggle against the seemingly natural, but disabling thoughts and feelings they have as social service clients. |
