Making Poverty Work

The international development community, led by the World Bank, has recently committed itself to the abolition of poverty; and the World Bank has set out, in its most recent World Development Report, Attacking Poverty, the means by which the target of reducing the proportion of people living in absolute poverty by half by 2015 is to be achieved. Indeed, the website of the World Bank Group now proclaims: 'Our Dream Is A World Free of Poverty'. Rather than dismiss this as a flight of fancy, we should ask why the claim is made, and why it is the World Bank that makes it. The answer touches on two key contradictions in global capitalism--its need to represent the interests of a single class as those of society as a whole, reflected today in the systematic effort to present as benevolent a neoliberal revolution intended to deliver people everywhere into the clutches of capital; and its need to operate as a single system across a fragmented world of competing states with no overarching political authority, reflected today in the search for international regimes and organizations through which the global system might be managed. The World Bank's affected concern for poverty, I argue, is a response to the combined effects of these two contradictions.