Make affluence history

by Kate Allen

While I support all the Millennium Development Goals, I have mixed feelings about Make Poverty History. I think perhaps the campaign that lends itself a little too easily to wristband-wearing “slacktivism” needs the voice of another movement – Make Affluence History. Forgive my cynicism, but Make Affluence History wristbands (if they existed) would be a little harder to use to accessorise our designer outfits, reminding us as the campaign does that we can never tackle poverty without first tackling our own greed.

The history of poverty tells us that the poor are poor not because of some unhappy incidence where they happened to land at the bottom of the pile. They are poor because their wealth has been appropriated and their wealth creating capacity has been destroyed. It was the violent plundering of Third World resources and Third World markets that created wealth in the North – but it simultaneously created poverty in the South. They are poor because the current economic system was set up in such a way that the rich can only remain rich because the poor are kept in their place. The idea of making affluence history captures something vital – something often missing from the awareness of the wristband-wearers, however well-intentioned: poverty cannot be overcome by dollars alone.

Consider the fact that while 1 billion people are hungry, another 1 billion malnutritioned people are victims of obesity. Indian activist Vandana Shiva argues that these rich-but-poor are also victims: ‘A system that creates denial and disease, while accumulating trillions of dollars of super profits for agribusiness, is a system for creating poverty for people. Poverty is a final state, not an initial state of an economic paradigm, which destroys ecological and social systems for maintaining life, health and sustenance of the planet and people. And economic poverty is only one form of poverty. Cultural poverty, social poverty, ethical poverty, ecological poverty, spiritual poverty are other forms of poverty more prevalent in the so called rich North than in the so called poor South. And those other poverties cannot be overcome by dollars. They need compassion and justice, caring and sharing.’

I want to examine the cost of affluence because I care about justice. Justice is concerned with poverty – not just material poverty, but all kinds of poverty. In terms of a lifestyle that reflects such concerns, I do try hard, though I am often blinkered and hypocritical. I want to do better. It’s complex. I want to explore a lifestyle of gaining spiritual riches that resource me to give up, time and time again, my material wealth and power, for the sake of imagining a different kind of world.

Kate Allen blogs at borntokneel.blogspot.com

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