Economic Citizenship. Amalia Sa’ar
class has been somewhat more admissible in the local discourse, but still limited. Although the rising rates of poverty have become a very popular topic for the media (Doron 2004), there is no readily available vocabulary to talk about “class,” which continues to be vaguely articulated as a “social” issue. As I show shortly, the discourse developing in the social-economy field seeks to understand class structure differently, its polarizing effect gradually overtaking ethnic and national divisions in importance. The popular social protest of summer 2011, which was led by and oriented precisely to the middle-class and mainstream political circles, gave this interpretation a further boost. However, as I discuss in the epilogue to this chapter and show in more detail in Chapter 5, this nascent discourse on economic citizenship and the right to dignified livelihood has been forming largely within, not against, the hegemonic ethnonational framework of belonging.
Gender, lastly, is probably the most difficult to pin down as an autonomous power mechanism. Despite some mainstreaming of public discussions about wage and other gender inequalities, gender is popularly perceived as “a women’s issue” and as secondary to the major divisions of Israeli society; it is generally seen as narrower and less explosive—the lingering legacy of inequality rather than a core mechanism with present implications. Several reasons may explain the evasiveness of gender as a structure of power in itself: one is that regardless of the many forms of discrimination against women in Israel, they are not unilaterally “oppressed.” Another is that gender cuts across all other social divisions: Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, Palestinians and Jews, religious, secular, right- and left-wingers, poor and rich … all involve women and men together. Last but not least, the inscription of gender onto the most intimate layer of self-identity—the construction and experience of femininity and masculinity as natural and personal—effectively disguises its systemic aspects. In contrast to this popular impression, this book treats gender not merely a marker of personal identities, but as a power mechanism that informs all the major institutions of society, and draws on feminist intersectionality theory (Crenshaw 1989; Anthias 1998; Yuval-Davis 2006) to trace the multiple articulations of gender with other bases of exclusion and stratification. In the following chapters I look at various aspects of these intersections: the multiple vulnerabilities of low-income women (Chapter 2); their immersion in emotional capitalism and their agency in utilizing the opportunities afforded them in the field of social economy (Chapter 3); their approaches to wage labor (Chapter 4); and finally, in Chapter 5, their integration into emerging discourses on economic citizenship.
Adapting Ideas of Social Justice and Social Responsibility
Since the end of the twentieth century, poverty reduction initiatives in high-GDP countries, particularly in large urban areas, have taken a clear community-oriented, participatory turn, combined with a growing focus on enhancing poor people’s capacity for economic self-sufficiency. In direct response to globalization and economic restructuring, large numbers of programs, commonly termed community economic development (CED), have emerged, which draw on the shared efforts of community organizations, public agencies, local businesses, and private actors. These initiatives offer comprehensive strategies that combine social and economic objectives (Morin and Hanley 2004).
Capitalistic-Bound Responses to Growing Social Gaps, the Idea of Community Economic Development
According to Alison Mathie and Gord Cunningham (2003), the evolution of CED theory represents a confluence of three different development paradigms: developing or improving economic systems and infrastructure, developing the economic capacities of individuals, and developing the economic capacities of groups to undertake community economic development. The first perspective sees CED as akin to the old concept of development-as-economic-growth, but taking place at the community level. The community is seen merely as a geographic location and has no theoretical importance. This perspective also sees development as a primarily exogenous process: the initiatives employed tend to involve technological improvements and infrastructure development, in the hope of attracting investment and industry from outside. The second perspective, individual capacity building, sees CED as the by-product of the economic success of individuals. “Community” tends to refer to a target group of individuals rather than to a geographic locality. Collective action may be employed not as an end in itself, so the main actors in the development process may be external NGOs and donors or local organizations. Lastly, the group capacity-building perspective sees collective action as an end in itself. Collective action enables individuals who lack the resources to independently improve their well-being to work together to achieve this end. This perspective defines CED as an endogenous process. The main participants are the members of marginalized groups who undertake collective action. In practice, though, as Mathie and Cunningham observe, all three perspectives are often present in initiatives of economic development. This has also been the case in the Israeli version documented in this book. CED then is initially a hybrid approach, and its implementations in effect condition it to retain this quality, since they invariably bring together groups, individuals, and stakeholders with very diverse subject positions. As we shall see later in the chapter, this characteristic is of central importance to understanding the cultural production that occurs through and around CED initiatives.
Another prominent characteristic of CED programs, besides their inherent hybridity, is their openness to feminist discourse and action, an openness that owes to their strong egalitarian, localized, and hands-on emphases. Since feminist approaches to women’s economic empowerment are central also to the Israeli case, I have chosen to borrow, for the purpose of this brief outline of CED, the definitions of Canadian feminist activists. In their study of young women in two inner-city Winnipeg neighborhoods, Molly McCracken and her partners (McCracken et al. 2005) define CED as follows: Community Economic Development is a bottom-up rather than top-down route to economic development that takes a capacity-building approach to poverty, and considers individual and community assets as starting places for building local communities’ capacity and economy. Community economic development aims to go beyond problem solving and build healthy and economically viable communities. It is an alternative to conventional approaches to economic development, founded on the belief that problems before communities—unemployment, poverty, job loss, environmental degradation, and loss of community control—need to be addressed in a holistic and participatory way. It can be defined as action by people locally to create economic opportunities and enhance social conditions in their communities on a sustainable and inclusive basis, particularly for those who are most disadvantaged. Along similar lines, with a slightly more focused emphasis on employment, the Canadian Women’s Foundation (2010) defines women’s economic development and sustainable livelihood as enhancing their employability, exploring and consolidating their economic possibilities, and facilitating their gradual passage from survival to asset building.
Community economic development then, proffers a very contemporary for-mulation of development that aims to combine growth with justice, through applying both socialist and capitalist ideas. While many CED initiatives are an evident continuation of the mid-twentieth-century movements against urban poverty, the close collaboration between grassroots activists, private businesses, and state agencies inevitably imbues them with pragmatic and mainstream political-economic ideas. Unlike the older social democratic emphases on the state as a benevolent redistributor of welfare, CED gives more credit to poor people’s economic agency by replacing their depiction as endemically needy and highlighting their “assets” and “capacities.” But—and this point will recur throughout the book—reorienting the discourse on economic justice to poor people’s assets is a potentially thorny move. While such focus celebrates their ingenuity, recognizes the value of their cultural knowledge, and ultimately underscores their humanity, at the same time it serves as a convenient token for drawing them straight into the neoliberal logics of self-sufficiency. One of the most widely discussed examples, to which I return in my discussion of empowerment later in the book, is the co-optation of traditional women’s saving circles by microlending conglomerates. Still, despite the emphasis on paid work as a major, if not the major source