Alienation and global poverty

Introduction

Philosophers writing on global justice speak mostly in the terms of charity and duty. Arguing from beneficence, the rich should donate their money to the most efficient aid organizations. ¹ Arguing from distributive justice, the governments of wealthy countries have a positive duty to help the poor. ² Arguing from harm, rich westerners should enact their negative duty to abstain from harming the poor, and so take political action to change global institutions to reflect this negative duty. ³ All of these arguments are ethical and helpful. Nevertheless, they address the limited question of what rich western countries and citizens should do to, for, or with the poor of the global South. Theories of duty and charity are not informed enough by the empirical conditions of the current form of global poverty at this stage of globalization, that is, the specific vulnerabilities vast urban settings of informal workers engender. In contrast, the concept of alienation, as the loss of the world, is vital to understanding the injustice of global poverty in its contemporary form. The language of alienation evidences how the problem of poverty is one of a lack of meaningful work, the kind of work that manifests people’s creativity, uniqueness, dignity, and creates a livable world.

The questions that the problems of global poverty require are more basic than the discussions of redistribution or charitable donations and the like. They are, in fact, the questions that characterize the beginnings of political philosophy. What are the limits and meanings of labor? What sort of tangible assets should one’s work entitle one to have? The problem of poverty is, in large part, the problem in the relationship between work and the world that this work produces, or fails to produce. The problem of work (whether too much or too little, who is doing it, and what fruits it yields in terms of housing, infrastructure and basic goods, in other words, what sort of world people’s work can build) is critical to the problem of the slums of the global South. This article, then, draws from Hannah Arendt’s theory of world alienation to stress how theorists of global poverty should, in addition to considering the third-person discourses of rights and duties, consider also the specific context of the urban revolution in the current stage of globalization.

The picture of global poverty today: Urban growth and informal work

Global poverty does not look today like it looked even 50 years ago. Since the 1960s, the world has seen the industrial poverty that once characterized much of life in 19^th-century Europe exported to and expanded in the global South. Urbanization has increased almost everywhere, and slums are expanding at a scale previously unknown in human history. ⁴ The scale and velocity of this change utterly surpass the scale of the slums in Victorian Europe. ‘London in 1910’, Mike Davis writes, ‘was seven times larger than it had been in 1800, but Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950.’ ⁵ We, in the discourse of the academic West, have inherited our ideas on poverty and urban slums from Victorian Europe, while it was reeling from the repercussions of the Industrial Revolution and from the early 20^th-century flood of immigration into the United States. These descriptions, typified first by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Charles Dickens, and later by Jane Addams in the United States, give a sense of what poverty was like in the western urban centers of the past. What is happening now, however, in terms of global migration into urban centers far from London or Chicago, utterly outstrips the conventions of discourse on the matter.

As the urban centers in the global South expand, cities are bursting at their seams. These cities have neither planning nor organization to house and support the influx of people that settle within their bounds, with the result that enormous slums develop on their outskirts. The UN Global Report on Human Settlements on The Problem of the Slums reports: ‘In 2001, 924 million people, or 31.6 percent of the world’s urban population, lived in slums. The majority of them were in the developing regions, accounting for 43 percent of the urban population, in contrast to the 6 percent in more developed regions.’ ⁶ Further: ‘It is projected that in the next 30 years, the global number of slum dwellers will increase to about 2 billion …’ ⁷ The UN calls this phenomenon, the explosive growth of cities in developing countries, ‘the new urban revolution’. It is unprecedented. ‘Every year, the world’s urban population is increasing by about 70 million, equivalent to 7 new megacities.’ ⁸ This shift is equal to 7 new New York Cities growing every 9 months.

People migrate to the cities most often because their livelihoods in the countryside have become unsustainable. However, all too often, their livelihoods in the cities do not substantially improve. They set up informal housing or squatter settlements, outside or beyond the sphere of city-provided goods and services. Priscilla Connolly observes that in Mexico City ‘as much as 60 percent of the city’s growth is the result of people, especially women, heroically building their own dwellings on unserviced peripheral land, while informal subsistence work has always accounted for a large proportion of total employment’. ⁹ Migrants build dwellings that do not meet hygienic or secure housing standards. Often, when people first arrive in the slum, if they do not have family already settled there with whom to live, they construct a temporary living space (a shack) out of whatever materials are available to them, often aluminum or tin sheets for a roof and cardboard for walls. In most urban slums of the global South, there is no plumbing; residents dig a hole for personal use. Without plumbing, there is no running water. To bathe, drink and cook, residents will either transport water from rivers or lakes, dig a shallow well, or pay local private companies to buy tubs of water off of traveling water trucks. It is rarely that local governments transport water to slum residents. The local governments most often do not pick up trash, either, so trash is burned, buried, or discarded in unofficial trash dumps, which can be located precariously close to human dwellings. Even once migrants settle into fairly stable communities, many times their neighborhood can be razed at a moment’s notice, repeatedly displacing their families. ¹⁰ The UN description of the situation reads: ‘The urban poor are trapped in an informal and “illegal” world – in slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid and where public services are not provided.’ ¹¹

In the slums of the global South, both the space in which people live, and the work that people do, is ‘informal’. Of course, many residents are employed by multinational enterprises [MNE]. For instance, most of the people who live in the colonias surrounding the Maquilas [factories] on the USA/Mexico border are employed by the MNEs that run these factories. In places like Dongguan, China, most people move there specifically to work in multinational factories, and their housing situations vary from informal squatting to formal, tenement-style renting, and dorm-style dwellings supported directly by the factories. ¹² However, in addition to the global factory-supported slum, there are slums that exist despite the noted lack of global enterprise to undergird people’s incomes. Thus many people in slums work in the so-called ‘informal sector’. Frederic Thomas describes the typical and fragmented nature of work in an ‘informal sector’, in Calcutta:

Three or four persons dividing a task which could be as well done by one, market women sitting for hours in front of little piles of fruit or vegetables, barbers and shoeshiners squatting on the sidewalk all day to serve only a handful of customers, young boys dodging in and out of traffic selling tissues, wiping car windows, hawking magazines or cigarettes individually, construction workers waiting each morning, often in vain, in the hope of going out on the job. ¹³

An idea of alienation that responds to global urban poverty

What kind of language, then, would capture this condition, a language that gives traction to the basic experience of living and working so ‘informally’, in the slums of the global South? The language of alienation captures some important aspects of this experience, insofar as it points to the importance of the normative relation between work and works products. The sense of alienation relevant to the global, urban poverty is a notion of unwanted privacy and forced isolation, enforced by economic and political expropriation, and overcome by public human creation and creativity.

Alienation is a relational and humanistic concept, implying that people have become separated from what allows them to flourish, to be whole, or to live up to the possibilities of their humanity. Historically, its central aspects are a deformation of personality, and a reduced ability to live one’s own life because of domination by accidental conditions. ¹⁷ The concept of economic alienation can be traced to the Roman introduction of the institutions of ownership and exchange. The Romans began using the Latin word alienatio to mean economic alienation, the action of transferring ownership from one party to another. Importantly, alienation originally meant the loss of ownership and property. Richard Schacht posits that, since the Romans, the word alienation has had 4 basic senses: ‘1) different, foreign, other, 2) economic transfer, 3) separation or estrangement from something other than oneself, to which one ideally should be united, 4) mental derangement or disorder’. ¹⁸

Historically, economic alienation occurs not merely when economic transfer happens, but when economic transfer causes separation between the person and something the person needs. Additionally, economic alienation is not merely a lack of control over one’s assets, but occurs when loss of economic control leads to loss of control over one’s ability for self-determination. Alienation appears when economic relations, or lack thereof, gain such a power that they over-determine other sorts of relations, such as the personal, political, material and spiritual relations, of a person. The process is spiritual, political and material: economic alienation happens when one’s loss of economic autonomy leads to loss of spiritual and physical autonomy. Alienation is neither purely material nor purely symbolic; it is a phenomenon in which there exist symbolic repercussions for material loss. As we will see from Arendt’s interpretation of economic and political alienation, the condition is about the profound interaction of the symbolic (or social) and the material: it is about the way our deepest spiritual and psychological needs express themselves, through the work of our bodies, to create a world.

To illustrate the interconnection between the material and the symbolic or social, consider, for example, when banks foreclose upon people’s homes. Foreclosure exemplifies how the loss of economic autonomy leads to alienation. A person is separated from an economic and material asset, her or his house, but it is not in that separation, only, that she or he experiences alienation. The problem is that the loss of the property mandates the loss of bargaining power in the market, a loss of respect as a worthy borrower. Thus, a separation from a material property or asset leads to a loss of self-determination within the broader social structure.

Of course, when we talk about alienation, the history revolves so often around Marx. In terms of our present purposes, that of forming a concept that is a response to global, urban poverty, Marx is both help and hindrance. The parts of Marx’s concept of alienation that are useful to thinking about urban poverty are considerations of alienation as a product of contingent and mutable social relations, not an intractable essence, feeling, mood, or power beyond collective human control. ¹⁹ Also, in Marx we find a useful vision of human nature as creative: Marx’s vision of ‘natural’ human creativity, the antithesis of alienation, was to exist in and acknowledge human community and the extent of our material relations and connections within that community. To suffer under alienation is to suffer because human relations create a material reality that inhibits or abolishes full human potentials and capacities. For Marx, alienation occurs partly because, under capitalism, the worker does not create the structure of the system, and the system’s mechanisms are outside of the control of the worker’s creativity. ²⁰

However, in considering the problem of the global, urban poverty, we must expand on Marx’s vision of alienation, beyond his diagnosis of the proletariat and the capitalist. Slum residents do all kinds of work, both productive and reproductive, and the singular model of the alienated worker, usually presumed to be male, laboring in industrial factories, is limited. Nevertheless, the processes by which migrants and immigrants end up in slums looks remarkably similar to expropriation, and Marx’s instincts on the relation between alienation and private property are still quite visionary. These ‘instincts’, as it were, can be expanded and applied to the current stage of globalization, and Hannah Arendt helps with such a task. Arendt’s readings of Marx offer a vision of alienation that can describe and respond to those conditions of global, urban poverty. ²¹ Arendt posits alienation in terms of the ‘loss of the world’, that is, the depravation of durable material structures and lasting institutions that are the preconditions for political speech and action. This sense of the ‘loss of the world’ gives us the most traction in understanding what it is that people suffer and fight against under global poverty.

Arendt on the importance of a world

Contra Marx, whose first concern regarding modernity was alienation from the self, Hannah Arendt worried first about alienation from the world. Furthermore, Marx saw the proletariat as redeemed through labor; Arendt saw the moderns as being redeemed through the product of their work, not their labor. ²² The problem, for Arendt, is that the poor were being made to labor too much, without being able to work to create a world. For Arendt, in order to break free from living in a condition of isolation, people must be allowed to stop laboring, stop working, to rest their bodies and put down their tools, and speak and act as individuals in the public realm. Thus, she distinguishes labor from work, and work from speech and action. Arendt is ostensibly more materialist than Marx; she cares about work’s products’ function and how long it lasts, and to what extent it creates a world in which humans can engage in political activity. Yet Arendt’s materialism is not reductive. The consequence of the creation of the world is to build a setting that allows for the disclosure, through speech and action, of people as absolutely unique and non-exchangeable subjects. Her materialism is, essentially, the precondition for her singular brand of humanism.

Arendt characterized modern life in terms of ‘world-alienation’. ²³ Living in modernity, one cannot create ‘trans-temporal remnants’, the literal buildings that make a world for people to inhabit which, barring a natural disaster, do not perish with a single generation, but entail security and a history. Here Arendt means a ‘world’ deprived in a very real, economic and political sense, that is, the loss of private property. In defining the loss of the world, she writes: ‘The greatest threat here … is not the abolition of private ownership of wealth but the abolition of private property in the sense of a tangible, worldly place of one’s own.’ ²⁴ A world is lost, for Arendt, not when capital accumulation is lost, exactly, but when one loses a protective place of one’s own from which one can be shielded from the vagrancies of nature. Arendt diagnoses the origins of capitalism, as does Marx, with expropriation of property and the enclosure movement. By expropriation, Arendt means the ‘deprivation for certain groups of their place in the world and their naked exposure to the exigencies of life’. ²⁵ Expropriation was always, and remains, a matter of the poor being cast out from their place in the world. Arendt explains:

The first stage of this alienation was marked by its cruelty, the misery and material wretchedness it meant for steadily increasing numbers of ‘laboring poor,’ whom expropriation deprived of the twofold protection of family and property, that is, of a family-owned private share in the world, which until the modern age had housed the individual life process and the laboring activity subject to its necessities. ²⁶

A world, for Arendt, is a home that supports human activities and the emergence of essential human characteristics. It is a place for humans to distinguish themselves from nature and from one another, and so also a space for speech and action; a world is where these political events are made meaningful by common remembrance, history and shared stories. The world, Arendt writes, is ‘not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.’ ²⁸

We create the world and enter into it by first erecting durable material structures, lasting institutions and cities. Once belonging to this world, we find ourselves both insulated from the vagrancies of nature and bound in relation to each other in specific, limited ways. The human-made world shields us from the natural circularity of time. We preserve for ourselves a rectilinear sense of time by breaking from nature’s circularity, and engendering in these conservative acts the possibility of human natality and spontaneity, where new things can appear and disappear within our common space. Living and dwelling in a world enable us to reveal ourselves as absolutely unique beings, and these revelations mark time neither as eternal recurrence nor plodding progress. Rather, time becomes characterized by new, unexpected beginnings. We maintain our properly human rectilinear time by building more permanent dwellings – to share the space of the world and to transcend the lifespan of individuals – and in so doing we create a history. The persisting structural and material reality is the precondition for a political space of appearance, where speech and action are made possible, and where it becomes very clear than one person is not equivalent to another.

Arendt writes: ‘To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every-in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.’ ²⁹ This sense that the world unites people while at the same moment it distinguishes them is important. In a setting of durable material structures, people bind together in community, and also set themselves apart as individuals, by which Arendt means they reveal themselves in their plurality, and not their sameness. Moreover, people are not, like the made world itself, subject to the logic of utility. Given the precondition of a world in which to relate, people are not considered, and indeed do not consider themselves, as means to someone else’s, or some other things’, end. In their plurality and their uniqueness, people themselves are the very loci of value to which the preposition of the ‘for which’ are applied. Furthermore, the existence of a world makes possible the desired situation, unlike that of market laborers, that the value of one person cannot be exchanged for the value of another.

Arendt writes that people construct a world in an effort to face their mortality. ‘If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.’ ³⁰ This idea is Greek in origin, coming from a time when the ancients believed they, as humans, were incomparably marked as the sole mortals in the universe, a cosmos filled with immortal gods and nature. The problem, for the Greeks, was centered on reconciling the relationship between the mortals and the gods. Nevertheless, the problem of mortality, or rather the need to transcend it in some way, remains with us today in the modern world. Striving for immortality is not vanity, but something essential to human need. ‘The task and potential greatness of mortals’, she writes, ‘lie in their ability to produce things – works and deeds and words – which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal but themselves.’ ³¹

Arendt’s account of the need of humans to create something, through work that is both an expression of us and transcends ourselves, has significant crossover in parts of 20^th-and 21^st-century psychology. Psychologists often speak of the need for generativity, to leave something behind of oneself. ³² Generativity here does not mean merely leaving a legacy behind to one’s own children. Rather, one can take generativity to mean that one must leave a common world to a common public. This need to leave something behind of ourselves evidences, first, the need to show something of ourselves in the public realm, which expresses our absolute uniqueness and irreplaceability. ‘If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the lifespan of mortal men.’ ³³ Interestingly (and although she does not term it as such), Arendt writes that the very denial of generativity is what marks slavery in the ancient world. ‘[The] curse of slavery consisted not only in being deprived of freedom and of visibility, but also in the fear of these obscure people themselves. That from being obscure, they should pass away leaving no trace that they have existed.’ ³⁴

Similarly, sociologist Orlando Patterson has claimed that the one experience common to all forms of slavery in history was a marked sense of social death. ³⁵ Patterson’s conception of social death involves much more than a dearth of generativity, extending to the denial of personhood to the slave in the form of an utter lack of social recognition. In a sense, Arendt’s perspective on slavery is similar to Patterson’s, except, for Arendt, social death meant not just obscurity in this life, but in death as well. For Arendt, there is a connection between the structural consequences of slavery on the slave’s person, and the consequences of alienation, which, in our case, is the alienation of poverty.

For Arendt, in order to create a polis and so to face one’s mortality, there must first be a world. Without a polis, a place from which to speak and act, we suffer from obscurity. The polis is a guarantee against the futility of individual life, and a way out of isolation. Such a path out of isolation fulfills an essential human need to leave something behind of ourselves when we perish. Arendt writes that these buildings, products of creativity

… are mostly, but not exclusively objects for use and they possess the durability Locke needed for the establishment of property, the ‘value’ Adam Smith needed for the exchange market, they bear testimony to productivity, which Marx believed to be the test of human nature. Their proper use does not cause them to disappear and they give the human artifice the stability and solidity without which it could not be relied upon to house the unstable and mortal creature which is man. ³⁶

Of course, there are many other immeasurably serious and more pressing harms from losses experienced by people who live in the slums of the global South: of clean water, a sustainable source of food, hygienic living conditions, a non-toxic environment, and basic shelter. But the cumulative effect of these harms to the whole person, or, if you like, to the soul, is one of alienation. We lessen our alienation when we are able to work, and not just labor, that is, when we are able to make manifest our creativity and dignity in a public, shared sense, so that we individuals are not carrying the entire burden of suffering on our own backs and in our own bodies.

From a discourse of rights and duties to a discourse of alienation

The inequality between the global South and the global North is an inequality of worlds, and of the ability to make the worlds. The cities of the global North – London, New York, Berlin, Hong Kong – are improving precisely because the cities of the global South – Lagos, Guayaquil, Calcutta – are expanding beyond their boundaries. Or rather, the gain of private property in the North is associated with the expropriation of property and assets in the South. This alienation is harmful; it causes suffering that prevents some people from flourishing, in the sense of manifesting their dignity in creating worlds for themselves.

Thus far, philosophers addressing global poverty have conceived the problem in terms of a re-envisioning of rights and obligations, a plea for charitable donations, a matter of distributive justice, or a call for greater recognition. A description of alienation should be added to a consideration of poverty and global justice. To be sure, the concept of obligation, in terms of duties and charities, and the concept of alienation, are not strictly symmetrical. The language of obligation, duties and charity is an explicitly normative language. It describes what should be done. Alternatively, the language of alienation is, first, a descriptive language. It adds nuance to a theoretical illustration of the current, predominant state of urban, global poverty. Neither discourse, whether of alienation or of obligation, is a substitution for the other. However, the descriptive discourse of alienation is an important addition to global justice discourse because, first, it points to the specific context of how most people in poverty are living, that is, in urban slums. Moreover, considering the descriptive language of alienation shifts the global justice conversation towards a different conception of justice as a whole, that is, to Amartya Sen’s idea of comparative justice. ³⁷ Comparative justice draws its relevant information from the day-to-day lives of people, in contrast with the dominant global justice approaches, which, coming from the contractarian tradition, direct their primary focus upon the rules of institutions.

The way in which discourses of global justice currently conceive of justice is in the ideal, Rawlsian manner, concerned with rules of institutions and obligations of those involved in institutions in changing those rules. But there is more to justice than institutions and rules. In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen examines the long history of ideas of justice and concludes that, at least in the western tradition, there are two very different approaches to justice: the ‘transcendental institutionalism’ of the contractarian tradition and the more realization-based understanding of the comparative tradition. These two conceptions might also be described, in partial terms, as ideal versus non-ideal theory, or thinking of justice as relating to the way to set up just institutions, antecedently, versus conceiving justice as a response to specific injustice, subsequently.

To explain this contrast in western law and political philosophy, Sen compares the difference between the concepts of niti and nyaya in early Indian jurisprudence. Sen writes: ‘The former idea, that of niti, relates to organizational propriety as well as behavioral correctness, whereas the latter, nyaya, is concerned with what emerges and how, and in particular the lives that people are actually able to lead.’ ³⁸ By the contractarian tradition, Sen means the distinct features of Rousseau and Hobbes, and later, Rawls: that justice would be conceived as ideal, or perfect, and that justice would be a matter of just arrangements of institutions and society. This is the tradition from which we see most debates about global justice stem: the language of duties and obligations is the language of just institutional arrangements. In the contractarian tradition, the current ideal is always contrasted with a former ideal – often the state of nature, often fictional – from which the contract rescues its subjects. The guiding question of the contractarian tradition is: What would be perfectly just institutions?

Alternatively, the comparative tradition asks instead: What kind of lives are people actually able to lead? How would justice be advanced? The comparative conception of justice ‘concentrate[s] on behavior of actual people, rather than presuming compliance by all with ideal behavior’. ³⁹ That is, the comparative tradition has concerned itself with how people are faring within an institution, or, generally, how people are faring, whether inside or outside any associative relation, regardless of institutional contract. Furthermore, there is understanding within this tradition that ‘the importance of human lives, experiences, and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and rules that operate’. ⁴⁰ So, the importance of an understanding of the condition of people’s day-to-day lives, their work and their communities, how the material conditions of people’s lives add up to a spiritual condition, cannot be supplanted by knowledge about duties and obligations. Rather, the two ideas of justice, one about people, the other about institutions, work together to create a holistic vision of global justice, and an informed vision of how to fight global poverty.

In order to amend the injustice of global poverty, we have first to understand the ways in which the majority of people are living within it, in the specific contexts of the urban slums, and what social and spiritual condition those material contexts engender. By understanding alienation, we can also understand that if there is a ‘solution’ to global poverty, it does not only involve changing the rules of institutions on the global level, but also involves removing obstacles for individuals and families to build a world at the local level. Fighting poverty involves removing barriers to people’s working to build a community and common infrastructure, so that instead of working for only their subsistence and survival, they can work to build a world. For instance, anthropologist Caroline Moser has shown how women in poor urban areas can get out of poverty: mainly through asset accumulation, most importantly the acquisition of adequate housing. ⁴¹ In a similar vein, architect and community action planner Nabeel Hamdi has shown how intangible goods like hope, belonging, identity, security, inclusion and dignity depend first upon very tangible goods like housing and secure land tenure. ⁴² Although the exact normative consequences cannot be wholly determined in advance of specific cases, naming alienation as an injustice could allow for advocates and activists in both the global North and the global South to enact changes that encourage slum residents to build, keep and expand their homes and communities. Moreover, it could promote action against the government-supported razing of slums, the expropriation of people’s settled lands, and expulsion from functioning communities. Finally, it could promote activism against labor practices that keep poor people in survivalist modes.

As I have said, there is certainly immense value to the current discourse of global justice, that is, the language of obligation that discusses the existence and extent of ‘our’ (rich countries’) obligations to the global poor. The fact is that these obligations do exist. Thomas Pogge’s position is tenable: the global economic orders, along with global institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that support such an order, are markedly unjust. By supporting these institutions’ current practices and rules of operation, we, in democratic societies, are failing even to fulfill our most basic negative duties to avoid causing harm to others. In addition, Iris Marion Young’s position, that as consumers, citizens of rich countries have transnational global responsibility for labor conditions in poor countries, is wholly compelling. ⁴³ Pogge, Singer, Young and others have proved very well the demandingness of such obligations.

However, approaches to global justice that delineate the extent of responsibilities are also limited, insofar as they come from a certain vision of justice, namely, the contractarian vision, which is concerned primarily with setting up the basic rules of institutions in the paradigm of ideal justice. These paradigms focus on ‘us’, the global North; to that extent, they are inward-looking. Insofar as they are inward-looking, debates about the extent of ‘our’ obligations can stagnate. In the field of global justice, we have established the extent of our obligations, put forth the logical case very well, but that is not all that needs to be said on the matter of justice. Nor does a singular focus on obligations allow for enough attention to how poor people in urban slums actually get out of poverty, through building a world.

There are limits to thinking of only the obligations of rich westerners without also taking a deeper (both empirical and theoretical) look into the specific conditions of the global, urban poor. Take, for instance, journalist Katherine Boo’s warning on the matter. Boo, writing and living for long periods in Mumbai, describes a common experience of international business people flying into Mumbai for the first time. Upon their descent into the city, these travelers view from above the sprawling Annawadi slum outside of their window, adjacent to the airport, and all they see is squalor; boundless, undifferentiated need. They see statistics. In viewing the slums only in terms of their absolute need and squalor, Boo writes, travelers miss a great deal. ⁴⁴ They miss the hardship, creativity and ingenuity of making a living, the unique solutions people come up with for managing quotidian tasks, and, in general, the dignified way in which Annawadi’s residents manage to conduct their lives despite many obstacles.They miss, for example, what Zehrunisa, one Annawadi resident and mother of 9, really wanted, and why she chose to stay in the slum and build up the community rather than leave:

She wanted a more hygienic home here, in the name of her children’s vitality. She wanted a shelf on which to cook without rat intrusions – a stone shelf, not some cast-off piece of plywood. She wanted a small window to vent the cooking smoke that caused the little ones to cough like their father. On the floor she wanted ceramic tiles like the ones advertised on the Beautiful Forever wall – tiles that could be scrubbed clean, instead of broken concrete that harbored filth in each striation. With these small improvements, she thought her children might stay as healthy as children in Annawadi could be. ⁴⁵

So, we must understand the way people live their lives in the global, urban South as a concurrent effort to seeking solutions and defining obligations. That effort to understand is not only anthropological but can, and indeed should, be the domain of theoretical philosophy as well. The language of alienation is a theoretical inroad into such understanding.

Global poverty is a matter of private property, the expropriation of which Arendt explains as the origins of world alienation. Slum residents remain poor because they have no private property, in either the sense of individual property or public community commons. The land upon which they live is constantly being usurped from them. The mechanisms of global capitalism are preventing them from getting a foothold in the world, a foothold people need because it gives them a place from which to speak and act. Paradoxically, Marx believed that the redemption of the worker was to be found in the abolishment of private property in terms of the means of production, while, in the case of global poverty, we should actually be advocating that slum residents be able to claim, build and keep their private and public dwelling places.

Again, understanding global poverty as alienation helps us understand the experience of the urban poor, living in slums, who are prevented from getting a foothold in the world. In conjunction with information from a Life magazine reporter, anthropologist Janice Perlman conducted a longitudinal survey of the residents of one favela in Rio, wherein she asked, simply, what the community needed. She gave the same survey, to the same neighborhood, in 1961 and then again in 2001. The self-reported results were remarkably similar over the course of 40 years:

What the Catacumba residents said they most needed in 1961 included: a community center where they could meet and conduct civic activities; a crèche [day-care cooperative]; a better school for their children; medical and maternal clinics; literacy classes; job training; and a police station to control the dope peddlers and criminals.

More than 30 years later, at the meeting of the surviving Catacumba residents and their descendants, the list was as follows: A cultural center; an autonomous residents’ association; a crèche; a better school for children and adolescents; full day schooling and social programs; preparatory courses for university entrance exams; a health clinic; a place for sports, leisure, and culture; work cooperatives for the manufacture and sale of products; courses on information technology and other professional skills; and help for senior citizens. ⁴⁷

Working in a slum called Flammable in Argentina, Javier Auyero and Debora Alejandra Swistun came to similar findings, based on what poor residents self-report needing. Auyero and Swistun gave local elementary school students disposable cameras, and they asked them to take pictures of things they liked and things they did not like, in and around their neighborhood. Auyero and Swistun report:

The concurrence among the groups was striking: among the things they liked were people (most of the pictures classified by them as ‘good’ portrayed friends and family) and institutions (pictures of the church, the school, the health center). Yet, even when they placed the school among the ‘good’ pictures, during the interviews they did not fail to notice its dilapidated condition … Overall, the students stress they didn’t like the ‘bad’ pictures because they show how dirty and contaminated their barrio is. ⁴⁸

In Flammable, residents are so consumed by their daily lives, their individual health and their family members’ health, that they cannot themselves form the basic institutions that would serve as steps out of subsistence living. That is, they do not feel themselves empowered in the sense of connecting to either the cities or the global economy as a whole. Auyero and Swistun conclude Flammable by positing that the specific suffering of the people in the Flammable slum is a kind of social suffering, marked by alienation. They passionately reject the kind of ‘social death’ to which they feel the residents of Flammable have been subject, along with the neighborhood’s continued expropriation and exploitation of its resources.

The Arendtian framework of alienation as a loss of speech and action, on the basis of the loss of a world, helps us understand the condition of the residents of Flammable and other slums in the global South. It shows us that the economic and political alienation that slum residents experience has a material basis: it stems from a lack of a world. Having a world means, first, having the capacity to work to build that world, rather than labor for subsistence in an informal and precarious economy. Furthermore, understanding urban poverty and informal work through the lens of world alienation underlines how global poverty is not ‘natural’, but a product of continual expropriation, wherein residents of slums enter slum communities because their livelihoods elsewhere have become unsustainable, and their slums are continually razed, even after they settle there. Finally, understanding the matter of global poverty in terms of alienation emphasizes how a lack of private property, in the sense of a place of one’s own in the world, forces poor people into unwanted isolation and prevents them from collective empowerment.