Book Review: Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up?: Organizing The Twenty-First Century Resistance. (Editors: Truscello, M., And Nangwaya, A.)
When academics and activists, drawn from differing ideological persuasions and dissimilar social milieu, from around the world collaborate in the compilation of a book on the topical issue of social uprising in a time of relative calm, it begs the question, what is the state of the social order? Is it less desirable than its opposite? The question, “Why don’t the poor rise up?” is addressed by twenty (20) academics, labor organizers, and community activists in a book of the same title, Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up?: Organizing The Twenty-First Century Resistance.
Drawing upon their experiences and research in communities of oppressed groups from around the world, the authors offer readers alternative perspectives to the mainstream assessment of the current political and cultural order. Their opus challenges the capitalist thought on poverty as the failure of individuals due to their personal attributes or as a correctable defect in modern capitalism. They reject the conventional definition of poverty which reduced it to income levels, and official reporting (p. 11). The authors explored “critical pathways of thinking about organization, resistance, rebellion and revolution” (p. 9), and offer different views on ways in which the underprivileged are defined, the forms in which they resist, and obstacles to popular uprising…