Down but never out
Pity the poor? Then give them power. Review: Squatter Life: Persistence at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires, Javier Auyero and Sofía Servián, by Gavin O'Toole
Squatter Life: Persistence at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires, Javier Auyero and Sofía Servián, 2025, Duke University Press
With that rare analytical capacity for understanding the true priority of cause and effect, Karl Marx began his analysis of poverty with an analysis of wealth.
To the bearded sage, there was a causal link between the poverty of the poor and the wealth of the rich.
Neither could exist without the other and both reflected poles in a social structure defined by coercion, domination and exploitation.
To Marx, poverty is the product of wealth, because capitalism operates solely to distribute capital upwards through the exploitation inherent in the process of production.
Capital accumulation is systemic: it cannot be ended through simple redistributive justice which reflects only a normative, tinkering liberal preoccupation that does nothing to address how wealth is actually created in the first place. In a capitalist society, wealth is generated through the systematic transfer of capital to those who own the means of production.
By this understanding, the total abolition of poverty is, therefore, impossible. Put simply, anti-poverty policies, by definition, imply anti-wealth policies.
Such an austere, uncompromising Marxian approach to the analysis of poverty has its virtues: it is, above all, dispassionate, reducing the precarious need for moral compromises in which an indeterminate level of individual wealth comfortably coexists alongside penury.
It would also characterise liberal egalitarianism as misguided wishful thinking that in fact merely serves to obfuscate the true nature of exploitation in capitalist society and tolerate rather than remedy it—something we all know, instinctively, to be true.
But above all, it ultimately reduces poverty to what it really is, the physical and moral expressions of a relationship of power in which the wealthy and hence powerful take advantage of the poor and profit from their vulnerability.
Poverty is never benign: the rich always benefit from it in multiple ways, and hence it can only be understood within and through political analysis.
It is notable that considerable contemporary scholarship of poverty in the US and Latin America is coming round to this “relational” approach, which explores socioeconomic inequality not as a trait intrinsic to a particular group but as the outcome of factors of power.
Thus, the scholars Matthew Desmond and Bruce Western, who have played an influential role in shaping a new US poverty agenda, write: “A relational perspective recognizes that poverty is not simply the byproduct of one’s attributes or historical outcomes but is also actively produced through unequal relationships between the financially secure and insecure … Poverty is not just a marker of low income but instead describes the accumulation of multiple disadvantages across various dimensions and institutions …”
It is in this vein that Javier Auyero and Sofía Servián approach the issue of poverty with an empirical focus on La Matera, El Tala and La Paz, marginal low-income settlements in the conurbation of Buenos Aires.
As they observe, poverty is not reducible to a condition but “correlated adversity” on many fronts that forces the poor to adopt multiple, diverse strategies to stay alive and maintain hope in the future.
Squatter Life is a granular ethnographic study of the key relationships that underpin those strategies in the extended family, neighbours, social brokers, and the state in its many guises.
As persistence strategies involve relationships between peers, but also those with unequal power—brokers, the police and local authorities—this provides an excellent empirical resource for contemplating poverty as an inherently political phenomenon.
At the heart of the study of poverty has been the informal social network, the so-called “web” of family, friends, neighbours and mutual aid initiatives that can provide assistance in its many forms on a reliable basis.
These networks are shifting, often reflect underlying power dynamics, and can erode under pressure. As a result, they can also be adverse for some participants, becoming abusive, degrading and exploitative.
With echoes of Marx’s analysis, Auyero and Servián bring to attention the extractive burden under which the poor exist throughout their lives and the many forms of coercive control they must endure.
Key to understanding the economic penury afflicting the poor of these barrios is their relationship with the labour market, which is characterised by “precarious exploitation” in which none of the attributes of the formal economy that we take for granted are present.
Informal work without a regular wage, health insurance, sick leave etc. is common whereby employers take advantage of workers like Cristian—sacked for visiting hospital after cutting his foot at a glass recycling plant—by failing to pay them and ignoring basic legal constraints.
Alongside crude labour exploitation, the state and its allies—sometimes in organised crime—exert a violent social control in poor neighbourhoods, where life can be nasty, brutish and short.
Force is endemic, and the authors note that in these areas where insecurity is a way of life violence is like an “oil slick” spreading out from inside the home to the streets and police stations.
Such a Hobbesian landscape is often depicted in some liberal individualistic explanations of poverty, especially in the US, which correspondingly trace its causes to the poor themselves and a “culture of poverty” absent of values.
In Marxian perspectives, these individualist theories may explain some instances of poverty—perhaps in cases of drug addiction, for example—but are unable to do so at an aggregate level because, yet again, they misunderstand the order of cause and effect.
Marxian theories would argue that it is precisely because people are poor that they live in a dysfunctional environment which recreates values that offend bourgeois mores—their limited access to socialising institutions explains their lack of “human capital”.
The bleak consequence of this position is that it would suggest that education can do very little to ameliorate poverty because it cannot change its aggregate, structural causes.
Nonetheless, it is striking in Auyero and Servián’s book that so much emphasis is placed by many of the subjects of their analysis upon educating their children, and the lengths poor parents go in order to do so.
As the authors point out, opportunities to get ahead are not evenly distributed and “practical expectations and hopes do not always correspond to the immanent tendencies of the social world”. Despite their extremely limited ability to shape their futures, the value of education is still a part of the urban poor’s “symbolic repertoire”.
They write: “Confidence in education as a path towards socioeconomic progress is certainly not a monolithic belief. But the practices of many of the families with whom we interacted during these two years … indicate a fairly common shared vision.”
It is this glimmer of hope that we can recognise in the eyes of parents—reflected more broadly according to the authors in the existence of a “collective hope” expressed in the collaborative undertaking of squatting land on which to live—that rejects a “compliance with dispossession”.
This addresses a question that haunts every page of this book: why do the poor comply with their marginalisation?
A resort to social struggle in the pursuit of dignity in the dusty squats of Buenos Aires would undoubtedly be celebrated by Marx himself, who contrary to many of his apocalyptic acolytes did not believe we should simply just wait for capitalism to collapse—but hurry it along.
Marx celebrated gains achieved through class struggle, believing that mass mobilisation can force policymakers to tax the rich and implement radical redistributive programmes. In short, politics is a weapon that can ameliorate poverty in the process of reclaiming wealth.
As Auyero and Servián write: “How the inhabitants account for the occupation of public lands, the cooperative construction of infrastructure, and the demand for basic services demonstrates that they believe in a social right that needs to be wrested through collective and contentious effort.”
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