Poverty Reduction and Redistribution in the Light of Civilizational Crisis: Lessons from South America’s Progressive Phase*

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Miriam

Lang

In the last fifteen years, Latin America has been a source of inspiration and hope for a good proportion of the world's Left. The successive electoral victories of forces identified with the Left or 'progressivism' in a number of countries, following Hugo Chávez's victory in 1998, shaped the subcontinent into an exceptional geopolitical space that promised possibilities for deep social transformation in a world under neoliberal hegemony. The relative simultaneity of self-proclaimed post-neoliberal governments, which undertook diverse attempts to reorient regional integration, even opened up possibilities for a deep transformation beyond the national scale. This exceptional historical constellation was the result of a cycle of struggles by Latin American anti-neoliberal and emancipatory movements during the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium. After two decades focused on resistance, these forces sought to continue their path of transformation by occupying the State apparatuses via elections and by the exercise of government.

Civilizational crisis and alternatives

One of the main premises of this article is that our world system is currently facing a crisis that is not only socioecological, not only multidimensional and global, but a crisis that is founded on the very civilizational bases of capitalist, western modernity itself: on its firm belief in the scientific-technological dominion of nature, on its assumption that wellbeing is associated with the accumulation of material goods, on the ontology of homo oeconomicus and the enshrinement of economic growth as the axis of social and economic organization, and on its tendency to commodify all aspects and dimensions of life. These bases not only have produced a specific set of problems, they also shape the possible solutions that are envisioned – often making things even worse. In consequence, many authors in Latin America and beyond characterize the current crisis as a civilizational crisis (Echeverría 2008; Lander 2011, 2013; Lang 2013; Amin 2012; Holloway 2013; Ornelas 2013; Millán 2013).

If this civilizational crisis results from the expansion of a single specific—and determinant—pattern of civilization, humanity must move away from this pattern and incorporate the diversity and multiplicity of cultures, ways of knowing, thinking and living that exist within the networks of life. It becomes necessary to identify, preserve and protect—and above all to learn to dialogue with—vital spaces, social processes and communities that are not completely permeated by the dominant capitalist logics, wherever they still exist (Lander 2013, 28; Moreno, Speich and Fuhr 2015, 53). Consequently, the civilizational crisis refers us to a political project of construction of interculturality in the sense defined by Catherine Walsh; it is a project of transformation that

affirms the need to change not only the relations, but also the structures, conditions and instruments of power that maintain inequality, inferiorization, racialization and discrimination. [...] Therefore, its project is not simply to recognize, tolerate or incorporate the different within the established matrix and structures. On the contrary, it is to implode - from the difference - into the colonial structures of power as a challenge, proposal, process and project; is to re-conceptualize and re-found social, epistemic and existential structures that put into play and in equitable relation different cultural logics, practices and modes of thinking, acting and living (Walsh 2009b: no page).

Moreover, in order to achieve real sustainability in our relationship with Nature and take the rights of future generations into account, the required civilizational alternatives need to aim at the reduction of the consumption of matter and energy and at the reduction of pollution, garbage and emissions, taking into account the existing inequalities between the geopolitical North and South.

Alternatives to the modern-western threefold paradigm of development, progress and infinite economic growth have emerged from Latin America in these last years. These include sumak kawsay or Buen Vivir (generally translated as living well, but more accurately as living in plenitude), and plurinationality or the rights of nature, embodied in the Constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador. At least some have understood those alternative paradigms as alternative civilizational projects (Acosta 2009, Gudynas 2011, Farah and Vasapollo 2011, Prada 2013), as the following quotation shows:

In the same way that the plurinational State is the alternative to the liberal contract of the modern State, and interculturality is the condition of possibility for society to be able to recognize itself in the differences that constitute it, sumak kawsay is the alternative to the capitalist mode of production, distribution and consumption. [...] Sumak kawsay also proposes a different form of relationship between human beings, in which selfish individuality must be subjected to a principle of social responsibility and ethical commitment, and a relationship with nature in which the latter is recognized as a fundamental part of human sociality. So far, it is the only coherent discourse and practice that can stop the predatory and inhuman drifts of capitalist accumulation which, at the rate that they advance, become a threat to human life on the planet. (Pablo Dávalos quoted in Prada 2013, 45)

As its main pillars, sumak kawsay considers humans as part of Nature, promotes harmonic relations with all other beings, and puts emphasis on communitarian construction from below in a territorial sense, leaving plenty of room for diversity. Other important principles are equilibrium, reciprocity and complementarity instead of accumulation, progress, growth and competition (cf. Hidalgo Capitán, Guillén García, & Deleg Ghuaza, 2014).

These alternative paradigms found multiple echoes across the globe, from Europe to the geopolitical South as a whole. However, in the Andean countries they quickly encountered the limits of realpolitik and were thoroughly redefined by progressive governments. The declarations of plurinationality and interculturality of Bolivia and Ecuador, which at the time marked new horizons of transformation, succumbed to the intrinsic logics of the State apparatuses that suddenly had to be managed. The often underestimated power of these inherent State logics was further expanded by the discursive framing of post neoliberalism as the “return of the state.” This simplifying move reduced transformation to the dichotomy “Market versus State” and enshrined neo-Keynesianism as the only possible alternative to neoliberalism.

Effects of the Market-State dichotomization

The resulting insistence on the central role of the State in social transformation, further fueled by the centralizing structural dynamics of extractivism and rentierism, builds on the long tradition of 20^th-century left-wing thinking that has confused the nationalization of property with its socialization, choosing not to address the forms of domination and expropriation of social forces by the State that this implied. It is the same tradition that contents itself with 'awaiting from the State' in its liberal variant or 'demanding from the State' in its left-wing variant – in perfect harmony with a colonial / patriarchal / clientelist political culture accustomed to depend on the goodwill of those at the top. This tradition of the Left, very present in Latin America, is often critical of those emancipatory struggles that seek to transform their territorial environment in present time and by their own efforts. Critics often argue that those initiatives are 'assuming tasks that correspond to the State' or 'replacing the State' (Houghton 2015, 122–3). The 'return' and expansion of the State orchestrated by the progressive governments in Latin America can be perfectly understood from this logic – as it also explains their persistent identification with the Left.

ThusThus, the inspiring achievements of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian constituent processes, which resulted from a long cycle of popular and indigenous struggles in the 1990s, have been reversed by logics intrinsic to the State; these logics were enforced by progressive administrations. These constitutions could have served as a starting point for a profound, integral, participatory and deliberative transformation since they implied an experimental process that had no possibility of being realized in the short term, nor of satisfying neoliberal 'quality' criteria such as efficiency. Instead, these progressive governments mainly reduced their content to State centrism and capitalist modernization. They reinterpreted concepts as potent as sumak kawsay or living well as simple synonyms of productivist 'development' and capitalist modernization. The simplistic Market–State dichotomy led them to completely ignore, and even to fear, the enormous potential that the commons—with urban and rural political communities as their central actors—has in the construction of civilizational alternatives – radically alternative germs of modes of production, reproduction, and self-government (Caffentzis and Federici 2014).

As a case study shows, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, site of oil extraction for several decades and also a territory of various indigenous peoples whose modes of living are still not completely permeated by capitalist logics, the ‘return of the State’ meant replacing decentralized, community-based health and education systems, which were building largely on self-reliance, with access to centralized and homogenizing health and education policies that created new dependencies. Regardless of the concrete quality of the former community-based systems, their mere existence constituted a fundamental value in terms of social emancipation (Lang 2017).

As Eduardo Gudynas (2017) noted in Capitalism Nature Socialism, the Latin American progressive governments applied rather conventional developmentalist policies. It is important to recall that in the aftermath of World War II, the development/underdevelopment dispositive became the main vehicle to promote capitalist expansion in the global South, in substitution of the former colonialist dispositive which was no longer politically viable. The promise of development was only the shiny side of a systematic devaluation of those civilizations and modes of living that were not organized around the western/capitalist paradigm. GDP as a comparative tool was supposedly applicable to all countries of the world in order to establish their poverty or wealth, while it set the mode of living in the USA, Great Britain and Australia as a standard. As Speich (2011) and Escobar (1995) have shown, its implementation in the context of the United Nations Organization and the institutions of Bretton Woods generated a completely new view of the world, where two-thirds of the population suddenly lived in poverty:

Almost by fiat, two-thirds of the world’s peoples were transformed into poor subjects in 1948 when the World Bank defined as poor those countries with an annual per capita income below $100. And if the problem was one of insufficient income, the solution was clearly economic growth. [...] That the essential trait of the Third World was its poverty and that the solution was economic growth and development became self-evident, necessary, and universal truths. (Escobar 1995, 23f).

In retrospect, the expectations of change in Latin American emancipatory social movements were truncated by governments in which, despite their progressive or revolutionary discourse, a wide range of political currents and practices coexisted, including conservative and neoliberal ones (Gago and Sztulwark 2016). Their commitment to finance social transformation through the incomes of intensified export of raw materials, following a neodevelopmentalist and extractivist path, dissolved with the collapse of commodity prices in the aftermath of 2014. Even before this, the political and structural implications of the extractivist model—in which the central State operates as sole agent of (re-)distribution— had limited the possibilities of transformation by imposing the centralization of political power, clientelism and corruption, as well as a paternalistic logic intolerant of dissent and pluralism (Meschkat 2015). In the context of extractivist neodevelopmentalism, environmental justice and the transcendence of our predatory societal relations with nature were sacrificed in the name of social justice and the eradication of poverty (Gudynas 2015a). This can be exemplified in President Rafael Correa's recurrent phrase to justify the expansion of the oil border and the introduction of large-scale industrial mining in Ecuador: "Misery cannot be part of our identity, and we cannot be beggars seated on a sack of gold".¹

In spite of all this, Latin American progresismo continues to be perceived as a leftist political experiment in large parts of the world. This is due to its ostentatious anti-imperialist rhetoric and also to its successes in reducing poverty and inequality. The latter is very present in the official discourse of governments, but also attested to by the data from international organizations such as the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). It is consistent with social justice as one of the traditional and core concerns of the Left (cf. Cameron 2009, Birdsall, Lustig and McLeod 2011, Jiménez and López Azcúnaga 2012, Lustig, Pessino and Scott 2013, Wahl 2016).

Several authors argue that the progressive governments have betrayed their original purposes, some even question that they ever were left-wing (Modonesi and Svampa 2016, Gudynas 2015b, Acosta 2016). While this questioning forms part of a legitimate dispute around what could be understood as a desirable Left today, I would like to propose another perspective: it departs from the fact that at the time, the great majority of Latin American left-wing actors have consciously opted for this path as a leftist one, aimed at achieving a profound social transformation. Only if we read the path of progressive governments as an experiment of social transformation in which large parts of the Latin American Left were involved—and which has undoubtedly yielded contradictory results, in some cases even contrary to the horizons originally posed—we will be able to learn from this experience. On the other hand, if we would assume that there has been betrayal, we will rather place errors, and thus the necessary learning processes, in the field of the 'other'.

Ecuador: Poverty reduction and the resignification of sumak kawsay

Ecuador figured among the recent success stories of poverty reduction in Latin America. According to official government information, published on the occasion of nine years of Citizen's Revolution, between 2007 and 2015, income poverty fell from 36.7 % to 23.3 %; poverty from unsatisfied basic needs from 47.0 to 32.9 %; and consumption poverty from 38.3 to 25.8%. Extreme poverty would have been reduced by eight percentage points (Ecuador, SENPLADES 2016, 25). In 2010, Ecuador was also the Latin American country that invested the highest percentage of GDP in conditional cash transfers (Bono de Desarrollo Humano) and one of those that showed the greatest increase in the real minimum wage since 2000 (Lavinas 2013, 18).

However, if we look at these achievements against the background of the indigenous and anti-neoliberal struggles of the 1990s and in the first decade of the 2000s, we can observe a certain tension. On the one hand, sumak kawsay as the principle of the new Ecuadorian politics had been framed as an alternative to development, a new civilizational paradigm. The narrative of sumak kawsay, plurinationality and the Rights of Nature was born of community practices and concrete social struggles (see for example Simbaña 2005, Walsh 2009a, Hidalgo Capitán, Guillén García, & Deleg Ghuaza, 2014, Schavelzon 2015). In the definition of the Ecuadorian indigenous leader Luis Macas,

This way of life, sumak kawsay, originates as the center of community life, is the essence of the community life system and is explained in the daily practice of communities; it is the fundamental element of the civilizational matrix of our peoples, which is still valid despite the violent interruption of coloniality and the aggression of the capitalist model (Macas 2014, 185).

On the other hand, the success stories around poverty reduction are inscribed in a clearly incremental, developmentalist narrative which enshrines growth and modernization as the only way to fight poverty.

The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 dealt with this tension by simply conflating Buen Vivir and development. In retrospect, we can observe that the specific format of a "Political Constitution of the State" has a determined function in the modern liberal State; it is elaborated within a pre-established structure and through a given procedure within the framework of representative politics. Of course, a Constitution is always the result of a political correlation of forces at a given moment. Consequently, the sumak kawsay paradigm already underwent an initial resignification by being incorporated in the Constitution. From a different civilizational horizon, "the alternative to avoid the human and environmental catastrophe of capitalism" (Chuji 2014, 158), although clearly conceived as an alternative to development, sumak kawsay came to coexist with ‘development’ in a text where the latter had the central place. In the 2008 Constitution, Buen Vivir is conceived as the "paradigm of life towards which 'development' should be oriented" (Cortez 2011). The doxa of modernization that serves as substrate to the thought about development continues in force, reflecting the visions of the concrete coalition of people who formulated Buen Vivir as a State policy (Manosalvas 2014). In this way, with the process of the Ecuadorian Citizen Revolution, the narrative of sumak kawsay as an alternative civilizational horizon was blurred and resignified, while the perspective of a capitalist modernization that would lead to well-being was enshrined as the principle which oriented government action (Walsh 2015).

Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa (2007–17), an economist, has been a classic representative of modern/western/developmental thinking. On the one hand, his presidential discourse built its legitimacy on a presumption of scientific, technocratic and 'objective' truth, regularly disqualifying its political opponents as liars, underdeveloped, incapable and ignorant (Granda 2016). On the other hand, Correa promoted a notion of linear time in which the beginning of the Citizen's Revolution in January 2007 marked a rupture or even a zero point of History. The past, which was referred to recurrently as "the long and sad neoliberal night," was the spot to where the country must never return, under any precept, while the desirable future was characterized as a westernizing modernization process in which the notion of living well—far from raising an alternative horizon—was used as synonymous for development (Lang 2017, 62ff). While Correa portrayed indigenous peoples as a naïve and easy-to-manipulate minority, both he and the institutions of his government constructed them in the first place as ‘poor’ or even miserable:

They believe that misery is part of the culture, of the folklore of our ancestral peoples. Our ancestral peoples do not live well, they need basic services. Children without shoes, homes with a floor of earth—this is not folklore, it’s not culture. In the XXI century this is misery. Pretending to immobilize them in such a situation is simply criminal. The challenge for our ancestral peoples and for the whole country is to overcome poverty, without losing our identity. And that is possible (Correa 2013, 63).

An Achuar indigenous leader from the Amazon contests this construction of the indigenous as poor thus:

For us, living well means to live in a clean and healthy environment, where there is nothing to worry about. That is why we criticize Rafael Correa when he says that indigenous peoples are poor because we live without shoes, because our children walk naked. We are not poor ... I always say that the people who live in the city are poor, because they have no territory and breathe polluted air (cit. in Vallejo 2014, 120).

As for the governmental institutions responsible for measuring and thus representing poverty, they were applying various sets of indicators at the same time: by income and consumption, by unsatisfied basic needs, as well as by a new multidimensional poverty approach introduced in 2014. As I have shown in a more extensive case study (Lang 2017), none of those sets of indicators approached taking the situated dimensions of a good life in the specific context of Amazonian indigenous peoples into account.

Some examples of the This governmental approach produced several distortions. First, in the multidimensional poverty index, the constitutional right to a healthy environment is reduced to only two variables, applied indistinctly for the whole of the national territory: having "excreta sanitation service" and "garbage recollection"(Castillo Añazco and Jácome Pérez sf, 11). Second, the "right to health, water and food" was measured only by having "water service by public grid" and an income above the extreme poverty line. How could such indicators, rather applicable to urban environments, make visible the deterioration of the specific, material basis of reproduction of life which is crucial for indigenous communities living in areas of oil exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon? Examples of more appropriate indices would include those that express the loss of soil fertility or the contamination of river and lake water, or the loss of other commons like hunting territories?

While they emphasize parameters that reflect the degree of insertion in the modern/western/urban mode of living, those official metrics systematically obscure the factors that are decisive for a good life from the perspective of Amazonian indigenous peoples. It is known that statistics not only construct the objects they measure, but also circumscribe reality to what is easily measurable, excluding and thus turning invisible what cannot be measured. On the basis of the indicators that have been chosen by the Ecuadorian statistics institute INEC, even the 'multidimensional' poverty index will inevitably represent the Amazonian indigenous modes of living as deficient, poor and backward – and in fact, on official poverty maps, the Ecuadorian Amazon is always tainted deep red, as a territory that needs urgent intervention. This poverty index does not represent any innovation relative to the much more appropriate model developed much earlier by the Amazonian Kichwa Carlos Viteri Gualinga, published in 2002:

When econometric poverty measurements are carried out in rainforest communities, those will continue to appear as the poorest of the poor, especially if indicators of economic income, employment, and access to goods and services are taken into account.

Of course, these indicators do not contemplate local potentialities such as the degree of organization or social structure, knowledges and production systems, which are of great importance to the autonomous satisfaction of needs. They also do not take into account the biological diversity of indigenous [...] territories, the factors inherent to what is now known as environmental services, the absence of pollution (or substantially less deterioration of the environment than in urban areas and their areas of influence), which many communities have, except in the areas affected by oil extraction. In addition, conventional poverty indicators do not take into account cultural identity as a productive potential for production and problem solving (Viteri Gualinga 2002, 5).

These lLogics inherent to modern State apparatuses inevitably lead to a concept of living well that is largely reduced to and aligned with the modern/capitalist mode of living. Once such a lens of perception is established, it is inevitable that modes of living more oriented towards harmonious material relations with Nature, self-sufficiency, autonomy and forms of self-government will be represented as deficient, deprived or 'underdeveloped', giving continuity to historical epistemicide. Picturing indigenous people as poor or deficient/backward, as passive recipients of public policies or as victims of discrimination, all have one thing in common: they are variants of the same narrative that, in the name of social justice, deprives them of their autonomy as subjects, of their collective agency, and their ability to reproduce life according to their own parameters.

Finally, the Citizen Revolution under the leadership of Rafael Correa also introduced a neoliberal management model that was mainstreamed under his government, which set abstract and decontextualized 'quality' standards of efficiency and measurable results (SNAP 2011, 2013, 2014). This model operated a transformation of the State in the opposite direction to that which would open a path towards interculturality or plurinationality as alternative civilizational horizons. These horizons would require an institutional opening towards processes of experimentation, a greater fluidity of institutions and rules that would point to the simultaneous and non-hierarchical coexistence of different systems of justice, health, education, social provision, etc.; as well as their progressive co-management with the most diverse instances of an organized society, with relative autonomy; thirdly, they would require a form of coexistence and interpenetration capable of accommodating different epistemological and ontological horizons (Escobar 2012). Critical interculturality and plurinationality mean, then, to relativize the institutional architecture of the liberal/modern state, to rethink its procedures and rituals. They also presuppose the possibility of correcting errors within a broad deliberative and democratic process, integrating the most diverse sectors of society into the decolonization of the State (Prada Alcoreza 2014, Soruco Sologuren n.d., Chávez 2012, Chávez and other sf).

Nevertheless, under the Correa administration, Ecuador opted for the exact opposite: the new Secretariat of Public Management, for many years directed by businessman Vinicio Alvarado, introduced the Government by Results (GPR) system in 2010 and implemented it throughout public administration in 24 months. This system not only subjected the whole of the public sector to a business logic in alignment with neoliberal culture. In accordance with the logics of New Public Management, it also emphasized values such as efficiency, effectiveness, competence, and parsimony in the use of resources and a standardized and technocratic vision of quality (Vabo 2009).

According to Welzer (2012), the positive assessment of efficiency and quick response corresponds to a specific mental structure of relatively recent capitalist modernity, historically forged from the nineteenth century on by synchronizing the rhythms of life and introducing integral discipline, e.g. through the introduction of public education, but also through the constant acceleration of production processes, aligned with the need to accumulate and grow economically. With this vigorous reengineering of the State according to business logics and their ingredients of synchronization, alignment, mainstreaming, and centralized control, the Ecuadorian transformation process closed the doors to any path towards transformative interculturality.

In conclusion, during the administration of Rafael Correa, Buen Vivir as an alternative civilizational paradigm was resignified through two interrelated movements. First, sumak kawsay was subjected to the functioning logics of the liberal state. By being translated into the language of Development Plans (soon to be called "National Plans for Living Well") with their corresponding frame of objectives, indicators and goals, and by being governed by a neoliberal management logic that pursued efficiency, sumak kawsay was domesticated by what Moreno, Speich and Fuhr (2015) have called the metric mindset, the obsession to represent reality in measurable numbers. Second, it was stripped of those contents founded on the indigenous episteme and ontology, and of its radically different understanding of socio-political relations and social relations with Nature. This was based on a model of nurturing and regenerating life which is not limited to the world of the human but includes all other beings of the natural world.

Poverty reduction as a core concern of the Left

Since the second postwar period, the eradication of poverty has been one of the central discourses to legitimize massive processes of original accumulation and expansion of the capitalist/modern/western mode of living on the planet. In an act of epistemic violence, the categorization of culturally different populations as 'poor' by the scientific/Western expert discourse humiliated and infantilized these populations, who from being subjects of their own history following their own parameters, became objects of intervention and assistance by all kinds of institutions. They devalued not only their own voices, but also their systems of knowledge, their cosmovisions and capacities of non-capitalist production, reproduction and care.

But Nevertheless, poverty reduction remains a core concern of the Left, closely related to its historical postulate of equality. The permanent and exacerbated production of inequality, as described yearly by OXFAM (OXFAM 2016; OXFAM 2017), is one of the central effects of the current civilizational crisis, since it seriously affects the survival conditions of large sectors of the world's population. It also makes democracy impossible, concentrating a great deal of power in very few hands. This in turn makes it increasingly difficult for people to directly influence the environments that affect them through the channels of representative democracy. In this sense, aspirations of equality and redistribution are certainly extremely valid, if we understand them as the restoration of a necessary balance.

However, as happened in Ecuador, leftist claims of equality and redistribution are usually expressed in terms of redistribution of money and 'resources', that is, within the framework that capitalist relations impose for the conception of the materiality necessary for the reproduction of life, for the understanding of property and the relationships with Nature. Taking the civilizational crisis and the need to build sustainability in intercultural terms as a starting point, we are forced to ask into what the excluded are meant to be included. The omission of this question would place the inclusion of a greater number of people into the unsustainable capitalist/modern mode of living as a horizon, undoubtedly aggravating the crisis. According to Esteva, Babones and Babcicky, what is commonly understood as inclusion, as development, is often synonymous with the incorporation of certain populations to the world market, which involves their cultural transformation into economic beings and the extinction of their previous ways of life (2013, 128). In the same way, much of the inclusion performed by Latin American progressive governments meant an inclusion into high-consumption activities/modes of living,² which in itself will always remain vulnerable to the crisis cycles inherent to capitalism.

As Lander (2007 and 2008) has shown, the dominant currents of socialist thought of the twentieth century, as well as their governmental practice in various parts of the world, have been part of the processes of expansion of the colonial monoculture of modernity. Their blind faith in science and technology, their claim to objective truth and historical determinism on the path to socialism, as well as their participation in the intersystemic competition for greater economic growth and higher productivity in the context of the Cold War, have helped legitimize central paradigms of the modern/western/capitalist civilization. They also took part in the construction of the predatory relationships with Nature that have led us to the current crisis of civilization. Their State centrism systematically marginalized and deactivated the autonomous forces of society, establishing (sometimes by force) universal standards over and above the existing diversity in the name of a universal proletarian culture and of productivism. Their narrow paradigm of redistribution, centered on quantitative logics, means of production and resources, also revolved around productivist values and reinforced reductionist imaginaries of well-being related to the possession of money and goods as well as access to services. They made invisible other ways of conceiving materiality and nature, as well as other modes of living that were organized around not unlimited material growth but rather around the sustainability of life itself. In the same way, they also helped to make invisible the social, relational and spiritual dimensions inherent to any form of good life, as well as many of the existing forms of work in human societies, like care work, subsistence work, community work, or informal work.

The Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva notes that the modernist and reductionist conception of poverty systematically confuses two radically different realities:

It is useful to separate a cultural conception which considers subsistence as poverty from the material experience of poverty which results from dispossession and deprivation. Culturally perceived poverty is not necessarily true material poverty: subsistence economies that satisfy basic needs through self-sufficiency are not poor in the sense of being deprived of something. However, the ideology of development declares them so, because they do not participate overwhelmingly in the market economy and do not consume goods produced for the market and distributed through it (Shiva 2004, 3).

As a consequence, people who eat what they grow, who build their own houses with local materials, who produce their own clothing instead of buying it and who use traditional or convivial technologies, are labeled as poor. However, not only can these practices support a good quality of life, but, according to Shiva, they are preferable to solutions offered by modern capitalism, especially in terms of sustainability:

This cultural perception of prudent subsistence as poverty has legitimized the process of development as a project to eliminate poverty. As a culturally biased project, it destroys healthy and sustainable livelihoods and creates real material poverty or misery by neglecting the very subsistence needs while redirecting resources towards commodity production (Shiva 2004, 3).

The fact that the dominant currents of left thinking have shared so many epistemological horizons with capitalist modernity not only weakened their anti-systemic potential. It also meant that within their central postulate of equality, they could not differentiate between the supposed 'poverty' that destines livelihoods centered on subsistence to dispossession and eradication, and to the impoverishment that is a consequence of this very dispossession, in the context of the gigantic machinery of inequality production that capitalist civilization really is. In this sense, it can be said that the experience of twentieth-century socialism has failed as a civilizational alternative to capitalist modernity (Lander 2016).

The Ecuadorian Amazon is one of the territories of the planet where the mechanisms of original accumulation in the name of the eradication of the poverty are still under way. The so-called ‘Socialism of the 21st century’ has taken up only a few political features of twentieth-century Socialism such as State centrism, the central role of the governing party that tends to structurally merge with the apparatuses of the State, and intolerance towards dissent, while it openly implemented capitalist economic policies, thus turning out to be a faithful heir to its predecessor in what concerns its colonial, homogenizing and modernizing perspectives on poverty.

While the damage that was caused in the context of the extractivist/neodevelopmentalist model in Latin America has found many critics (Bebbington 2009; Lang & Mokrani 2013; Gudynas 2017), this is not the case of the damage that has originated from the modern/colonial epistemic framing of social policies and poverty reduction policies implemented by progressive governments. These, on the contrary, have been and still are praised by many voices of the international Left. Nevertheless, when applied in territories not completely permeated by capitalist logics like the Ecuadorian Amazon, they result in new enclosures. In the name of reducing poverty, the Citizens' Revolution has deprived the Amazonian peoples of their own resources in health and education, and continued to destroy their non-monetarized economies (which had already been weakened by the oil companies) by pushing the circulation of money into new territories, for example through the expansion of conditional cash transfers.

The construction of civilizational alternatives requires us to overcome these limitations of the hegemonic thinking of the Left that has diminished its utopian and anti-capitalist potential. It also requires us to recognize that the diversity of modes of living, thinking, and knowing that still exist on the planet is crucial to the quest for alternatives. Thirdly, it requires us to recognize that it is urgent to build sustainable, non-predatory relationships with Nature, and that this sustainability requires the construction of intercultural relations of learning that call the universal paradigms of capitalist welfare into question – establishing a diversity of contextualized understandings of what a good life means. And, finally, it requires us to take our distances from all kinds of incremental narratives around the eradication of poverty. These narratives not only place the eradication of poverty within the linear understanding of progress ('there are still so and so many poor', as regularly stated by UNDP 2014, for example), but more importantly, they make the constant production of inequality invisible and de-problematize the perverse concentration of material wealth and power in very few hands.

Along the same lines, the almost automatic perspective of expanding 'access to goods and services' that is so central to welfare policies entails 'universal' welfare parameters that often correspond to specific urban/modern modes of living and in rural contexts imply a profound reconfiguration of forms of production and reproduction of the networks of life, without the 'beneficiaries' having made a conscious, informed decision.

Can social justice really consist of everyone receiving exactly the same amount of goods, services, and resources? Don’t we have to incorporate a huge diversity of profoundly context-dependent needs into this horizon, in agreement with the construction of a transformative interculturality and buenos vivires in plural? Instead of a redistribution in the very terms of capitalist society, operated by the liberal State, wouldn’t it seem more appropriate to think of a restitution, or a re-appropriation from below, of the materiality necessary to the reproduction of life on which the different modes of living rely—and in their own respective terms?

The dominant version of the redistributive paradigm of the traditional Left, understood as the great alternative narrative to capitalism throughout the twentieth century, is really part of the same anthropocentric, monocultural and patriarchal civilizational pattern that the multidimensional crisis that we are living calls into question. If the dominant Marxist tradition was involved in the implementation of the 'development–underdevelopment' dispositive, and if the intersystemic competition of the Cold War even furthered the centrality of economic growth as a success parameter of societies, it becomes necessary to carefully review our understandings of inclusion, equality and redistribution.

Notes

* This work was supported by the research fund of Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar.

1 ‹http://www.andes.info.ec/es/actualidad/9675.html›, consulta: 5 de septiembre de 2017.

2 Lavinas (2013, 33) describes how in Brasil, Access to consumer goods like cell phones soared, while Access to services like sewage did not.

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