Of course, exclusion from the human community is one of the defining conditions of homelessness. Or, as political scientist Leonard Feldman contends in Citizens without Shelter, in a country such as the United States, where human rights are so deeply entangled with property rights, the figure of the homeless person defines our political community precisely by virtue of being excluded from it. Discounted from membership in both the private sphere, through the lack of a home, and the public sphere, via the laws, bans, and other regulations that govern whether and how the indigent can access (or not) and move (or not) within public spaces, the figure of the homeless person is the exception that constitutes the rule: the embodiment of the bare, purely biological life against which the fully political, fully human life of the citizen, i.e., the bearer of rights, is defined.

― “Shelter Stories: Homelessness, Human Rights, and Community Writing Centers”

The two dimensions of poverty: physical and

symobolic

Physical poverty has to do with material deprivation, i.e., a

lack of access to food, shelter, clothing, etc.

Poverty in its symbolic dimension has to do with a lack of access

to the sphere of expression and

communication, i.e., to the ways that we create and share our

stories, histories, ideas, arguments, etc.

Marx’s theory of capitalism:

systematic injustice

According to Marx, economic inequality isn’t an unfortunate, accidental side effect of an otherwise fair system. It’s what capitalism is designed to produce. It’s not a “bug” in the system; it’s the system’s defining feature. The system can’t be “fixed” through reform, then; it can only truly be changed through revolution.

Ideology — or, the base and the

superstructureAccording to Marx, our ideas about the world — even (or perhaps especially) the most seemingly “obvious” ones — express and serve to justify the social and economic relationships that define our historical era. For example, the belief that personal success springs from individual virtue isn’t “obviously” true — it’s a way of thinking that justifies the social inequalities required by that capitalist mode of production.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

― Karl Marx, The German Ideology

“Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. . . . In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

― Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Struggling against the system — in both

dimensions

https://vimeo.com/193964838

NYT story