What is the Right to Not Be Poor? Why a Truth Commission

The Right to Not be Poor

The Right to Not Be Poor is a demand emerging from the life and death struggles for water, housing, work, livelihood, health, peace, equality and more. It suggests a world where the meeting of our basic needs is guaranteed and non-negotiable. It is a moral declaration against a system that says, “if you can’t buy it, you don’t deserve it.” It also asserts that violence in the name of defending that system – racist violence, military and police violence, violence against the land itself and our natural resources – cannot be defended. It is consistent with the founding creed of this country, expanding the understanding of our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness given today’s conditions and possibilities.

The Right to Not Be Poor is both a comprehensive vision of a world free from want, violence and fear, and a rallying cry for an all out offensive against the conditions causing our poverty and misery.

What is the Truth Commission on the Right to Not be Poor? What is its Charge?

The Truth Commission on the Right to Not Be Poor is part of the broader effort to revive the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign by bringing together the struggles of the poor and dispossessed today. As part of this New Poor People’s Campaign, the Truth Commission understands poverty and the devaluation of human life to be the bedrock of the multiple social crises we’re facing, including the crises of racism, militarism and ecological devastation.

These crises have gotten more intense since the economic crisis of 2008. They’ve also become more deeply intertwined. From Detroit and Flint and Standing Rock to California, the Pacific NorthWest, the Gulf Coast, the Border, Appalachia and the Rust Belt, we are seeing communities fight these evils on multiple fronts.

We use the word evil deliberately. These crises are not just bad or unfortunate, but in fact immoral — even sinful. They are immoral because they arise out of artificial conditions of scarcity even though we live in a time of unprecedented wealth and prosperity; they are sinful because, in the midst of this abundance, the mass abandonment and violence against the poor goes against our deeply held belief that all life is sacred.

This Truth Commission will have three tasks:

• Expose the lies that are told about poverty and the poor today. This includes the idea that we’re living in a time of scarcity, and that these crises are the result of individuals making bad decisions or of chance. The Truth Commission is taking on this narrative in particular because of how it is used to sow division, fear and mistrust among us.
• Begin to identify a new moral vision for our society, one that is emerging in the organized responses of communities in battle against poverty, racism, militarism and ecological devastation.
• Help develop a platform that can unite these struggles into a campaign against the root causes of these evils.

How will the Truth Commission be Organized?

For these Truth Commissions, we’re drawing on the kinds of “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” that have been used in different contexts around the world. We’re also developing that model in a new direction: our central purpose is to advance the unity of the struggles of the poor and dispossessed by building our collective organization. We’re building on a long history of poor people organizing poor people in the United States and our use of town halls, tribunals, bus tours, coordinated action and community hearings to expose the truth about who are the poor and why we are poor.

The model for the Truth Commission isn’t to gather evidence from those who are experiencing poverty, but to work together in the development of a new practice and vision for building real class unity. This approach recognizes that we who are not in power need to organize ourselves in order to grow our power. The Truth Commission is one way to do that.