2.1 Personal and others’ poverty. Difference and distance

Among the significations that have been collected⁵, an evocation of a difference often emerges, between the self and the varied world of those associated with services for severe marginalization, through which recognition of oneself as part of that phenomenon referred to as “new poverty” appears to be semantically utilized to identify or trace a distinction. This gives the perception of a distance from that overt and “visible” hardship which places some subjects on the sidelines of the social scenario, allowing the perception of (and/or the possibility of perceiving) oneself as being within a less shady area, a “gray area,” with different characteristics.

In the interviews, such distinction seems to correspond in some cases to a not always explicitly expressed (albeit clearly invoked) need to distance oneself from images which materialize anxiety and fear of a further slipping of one’s condition towards the extreme frontiers of exclusion and severe marginalization.

In other cases, it also seems to recall and reproduce stigmatizing attitudes which turn away an otherness perceived as threatening, time and time again identified in the foreigner, the different, the destitute. It is here that distance becoming separation is more evident. Problematically in line with a social and educational climate which tends to demonize the needy and dependent and which interprets the intervention of social services in the field of marginalization not as an instrument for the promotion of everyone’s rights but as the unjust protection of some at the expense of others, the other is indeed often perceived as a threat to one’s chances of survival, support, or redemption. A distance which, while it tells of the hostility between “next to last” and “last,” testifies to a rage and resentment where competition and social envy are in danger of obstructing any possible collocation of a collective dimension from the very start (Revelli, 2010).

2.2 Poverty and ineluctability

Nevertheless, in the collected accounts and considerations, poverty in general is described as a phenomenon which is mainly characterized as being widespread. “There is so much poverty nowadays” is a recurring expression; a statement which seems to be self-evident. Poverty in fact corresponds to that condition which is visible and can be found in one’s own circle of friends, in one’s own context of life, which is tangible when one lines up for food aid, when one speaks with neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances.

Rarely, however, a clear perception of the wide extension of the processes of impoverishment seems to cross the threshold of observation, to move towards more general considerations on the connected causes and macro-social factors. In the few cases in which it was observed, attention to these dimensions takes on the form of a vague reference, which perhaps represents a not entirely successful attempt to access a political interpretation of poverty and its related issues. Even where context takes on some kind of role and where social influences and economic and political choices seem to carry some weight on one’s own and other people’s lives, this awareness translates into partial interpretations, which are oversimplifying and trivializing, and which would seem to be indicative of the absence of interpretative tools and of spaces in which they could be acquired. In the interpretation of the dimension of work in relation to poverty, for example, there seems to be in fact an awareness of the economic, social and existential implications (Cornacchia & Tramma, 2019; Murgia, 2010; Gallino, 2001; Sennett, 1999) of a bad job market made up of insecurity, flexibility, exploitation and slavery. However, such implications almost always take on the rank of facts: unavoidable elements of the contemporary scenario, whose recognition does not seem to go hand in hand with considerations on where, how, to whose benefit/detriment these elements are contributing in the definition of processes of impoverishment. Work flexibility itself, in particular, emerges as an inherent element of the present and future social horizon; a given fact before which one must apply adaptive strategies which, in turn, reinforce one’s self-perception as being solely responsible for one’s own condition.

In the educational vacuum left over by the ending of that adult education connected to the issues and aims of literacy, emancipation, awareness, not only some interpretative tools seem to remain inaccessible to many, but the need itself to own them seems dormant. In this vacuum, other kinds of education seem to have found space and comfort. This is what conspiracy theories and global surveillance interpretations indicate, as they are found to be flourishing on the web and have been collected in the present research. They are an expression of a poverty perceived as being “maneuvered” (along with its socio-political solutions) and of instrumental use to the services aimed to contrasting this same poverty. However, within a conspiracy framework, this rendition, though able to render the sense of subordination and helplessness of those who are slipping into poverty, seems to offer some partial and confusing cues, in which critical analysis cannot seem to find a practical interpretation (both individual and collective) and where at best a consoling, romantic image of the poor as one who can devote him/herself to the salt of life, love and affections, can find a space.

2.3 (Hyper)-responsibility, guilt and shame

In a cultural climate which places great emphasis on individuality and its responsibility, and offers little space to the exploration of the social circumstances in which the process of building the self occurs, an intimistic vision of poverty seems to be reinforced (Sennett, 2006), which renders the individual hyper-responsible. In the collected narratives, the exhortations (both received or self-reported) to “buckle down,” to “fight back,” to “get off your butt” (Italian man, 69 years old) contribute to a rhetoric of being active, which is well connected to the rooted myth of the self-made man and antidote to the “getting by” and “wasting time” associated to an image of poverty which is perceived as culpable.

The exhortation, ambition and social expectations linked to the “making it on one’s own” call for independence, self-reliance and autonomy. At the same time, these seem to connect with a widespread and problematic reading of the forms of aid to contrast poverty which are interpreted as tools to promote passivity or, worse, of social parasitism.

In the chain of representation in which poverty is experienced and conveyed as being connected to guilt, social inequalities are substituted by merit (Boarelli, 2019), while they adopt (problematically so) a distinction between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor, between those who sit on the couch and those who take action, between generative, enabling interventions and charitable assistance, which makes people passive and dependent.

If to some extent they seem to allow access to a symbolic and self-referred redemption, attempts to meet social expectations of autonomy and self-entrepreneurship, still seem to stifle the cry for help of those who actually need it. Worried about revealing the hardships they are facing — “I am still embarrassed […] it almost feels like sponging off […] I wish I were more independent (Italian woman, 50 years old) — and afflicted by a sense of shame at requesting help from social services (Morrone & Reynaudo, 2011; Sgritta, 2011), for many it is preferable to (often) turn to informal resources (primarily the family), which to some extent allows the retaining of the perception of”making it on one’s own," of consequently being able to continue considering oneself as “active.”

Within a cultural climate which associates public dependence to something shameful (Sennett, 2004) and which also finds expression and cause in the process of economic and cultural dismantling of the welfare system (Tramma, 2015), these services no longer appear as strongholds for the protection and guarantee of everyone’s access to citizen rights, but as instruments that resemble charity, at best. Not surprisingly, they are often requested when it is too late, when the need for them is already overt and severe.

The (learned) necessity to break free of the guilt of poverty and failure, with a strategy of distinction between those who are “worse off” (Bauman, 2016) and those who take care of them, seems the result of an education that can also be traced back to those self-representations as a valid person, free of vice, generous, active and prone to helping others. Self-representations which seem to say: I am in trouble but I did not deserve it, but I am a “good person.” And yet, once more, the hyper-responsibility within which the juxtaposition of worthy/unworthy, guilty/not guilty, active/passive is carried out, prevents the focus on and the comprehension of other aspects which pertain to the self, one’s own history, as well as one’s social and relational context. Less Apollonian aspects, whose silencing generates disorientation and suffering, create experiences of inadequacy, guilt, personal failure which, in a vicious cycle, are likely to find a viable explanation and scope for action in further personal responsibility.

3.1 Attribution of meaning in urban suburbs

Presently, it is traditional territories that experience more and more “hardship” (Palmieri, 2012, p. 20, author’s translation), and which are nowadays further weakened in their socio-relational potential by the pandemic event. Particularly involved seem to be the “outskirts, […] geographical areas which are especially deprived, poor and/or devoid of resources,” “distressed” areas which “produce malaise, inasmuch they determine conditions of experience, relationship, communication,” in a certain sense signification, “in a sort of vicious cycle” (ivi, p. 20, author’s translation). It is here that, starting from a problematic territory, equally problematic personal histories and significations arise (binding and partial) and where processes and pathways out of poverty (old and new) seem hindered and “adaptation by resignation” is more frequent and functional to survival in the immediate present more than to the planning of the future (Gui, 1996, pp. 24–26; Uccellatore in AA.VV., 2019, pp. 7–9). An alternative (re-)signification seems to be disrupted, which could reconnect stories of impoverishment not only to a necessary individual resilience, within life situations and mortified and mortifying territories, but rather to shared opportunities of criticism to the social and structural conditions which have produced the experience of precariousness.

The same Giambellino in Milan is recounted by those who live it⁷ as being a limitation, more than a resource; a fatiguing context in which people “float around” (as stated by a worker at a cultural promotion association), as they can do nothing else. It is also described in such terms by those who work in the socio-educational services and by those who live/work there (bars, pharmacies, tobacco shops etc.), who have a history of radication and a relational significance in the neighborhood and who have thereby become “unpredicted” services: informal points of reference and of interception of the requests for help of the residents.

In the voices of the small business owners collected in the study, these requests take on the outline of a “delegation” (shopkeeper 1, male) of the public to the territory in providing not only the reception of, but also the answers to widespread needs, contributing to the fueling of a sense of institutional abandonment of an ever-more “forsaken” periphery (shopkeeper 2, female; Schiavi, 2018), and a voluntarism which is in some cases applauded by the same shopkeepers, with the danger of proclaiming (sometimes narcissistically) a sort of territorial self-sufficiency. The consistent mobilization of local businesses, however, seems to be subject to a mandatory solidarity, made inevitable by the “constant and continuous relationship” (shopkeeper 1, male) they have with the territory and its inhabitants, who ask them for help and “cry […]: ‘what am I going to do?’” (shopkeeper 3, male).

Such mobilization seems to insert itself problematically in a framework in which the territories (some in particular) witness the multiplying of paths of impoverishment which are less evident compared to traditional ones and because of this are difficult to manage and to deal with; where a rational setting up of a system of solutions to collective issues which are widespread in the cities (moreover painstakingly interpreted in such terms) and, in general, in the “post-Ford social systems [which] struggle to generate secure life conditions” seems to be exhausting and insufficient (Negri, 2006, p. 14, author’s translation). Connected to this struggle seem to be the significations that are given to the so-called new poverties by those who, for various reasons, mobilize — officially or informally — in the attempt to contain or manage them: sometimes in fear, in an improvised and contradictory fashion; sometimes anachronistically, turning to an old-fashioned idea of poverty and “employing tried and tested if not obsolete methods” (Palmieri, 2012, p. 45, author’s translation).

3.2 Poverty through the lens of “unpredicted” services

Also part of the new poverties seem to be the same personal histories of some Giambellino shopkeepers who, due to the ongoing general economic crisis, have been forced to, in some cases, resize their businesses, as well as the informal help given to an impoverished population who struggles in its purchasing power. By their own accounts, they seem to position themselves between the desire to “lend a hand, however possible” (shopkeeper 4, male) and the need to receive help themselves. Despite assuming the form of a sort of help desk, doing “the social thing” and being “on the side of those who help” (shopkeeper 4, male), they in fact occupy a border position, sharing the same territorial fragilities with their clients. They do so by inevitably making compromises, either unrecognized or undeclared, in an attempt to preserve the desire for solidarity as well as their necessary personal income. As emblematically shown in the account of the neighborhood tobacconist, it is possible to describe oneself as a substitute for social services (“social aggregator” in her own words), therefore distant from those who are experiencing impoverishment, while still trying to ensure a constant income, informally supporting (through discounted prices) dependent behavior: from gambling to discounted cigarettes.

In this study as well, the need for a distancing from a widespread condition of impoverishment emerges (sometimes exploited competitively in the free market logic), which partly allows (at least in its perception) to separate (and separate oneself), those who help from those who are helped. What is not always made clear is the fragility and precariousness of the boundary between the two.

Such concern (for separation) can also be glimpsed beyond the threshold of those places that present themselves to the territory with a more explicitly educational mandate (albeit mainly on a volunteer basis), such as the oratorio. In one worker’s account the difficult experience of one of the volunteers emerges, who though experiencing progressive impoverishment stalled in requesting assistance. Yet this close account is only briefly mentioned, and the proximity itself of the colleague’s story has been somehow repressed, in the denial — within the same account — of encountering intermediate or common stories of poverty. It is this struggle to recognize and tell which seems to disappear when the narrative dwells on the analysis of those poverties which are more overt, and may thereby be considered more distant.

As already mentioned, within a widespread culture which considers “those who will not ‘be successful in life’ […] [as] solely responsible of their own failure” (Boarelli, 2019, pp. 18–20, author’s translation), such distancing seems to address a need to contain the perception of inadequacy, guilt and shame; perceptions which seem perhaps amplified by the greater social recognizability connected to the roles and functions that the interviewed subjects cover in their territory.

3.3 Socio-educational services and new poverties

This distancing seems to thwart the emergence in public and the recognition of stories of impoverishment: their connection to passages of life that are increasingly normal and common, as well as their spreading (presumably on the rise), which signal an increasingly consistent widening of the “gap between those who are very well off and those who are very poor” (worker at a job coaching service in Milan).

Not entirely exempt from this laborious approach to this phenomenon seem to be the same workers at those socio-educational services in charge of collecting the citizens’ needs and planning solutions (collective as well as individual) in Milan. They now confine new poverty within a newly individual area, which distances them from a proximal and normal zone and binds them to a “psychic suffering” (Ibid.), to “specific conditions of fragility” (worker at the Siloe Caritas Ambrosiana), personal or at most domestic (Caritas Ambrosiana, 2018, p. 4); now, once again, although recognizing the complexity of the phenomenon, they highlight the difficulty of identifying/accompanying stories of impoverishment through multiple causes. This happens due to an expansion of a gray area and the feeling of shame, which make the state of need less obvious and the definition itself of new poverties less predictable; because of an access which is “already beyond the threshold, […] already in distress” (worker at the social housing area of the social cooperative Spazio Aperto Servizi), which complicates the distinction — defined in some cases as “meaningless” (worker at a job coaching service in Milan) — between old and new poverties. The difficulty of definition is found both in the direct contact with stories of impoverishment, and in the (academic) “research” of the phenomenon “which belongs to this era,” therefore “there are no previous experiences and no literature to draw from […], it is not well-established” (worker at the social custody project of the social cooperative Spazio Aperto Servizi).

Despite these difficulties and regardless of the motivations given in some cases to the slipping into paths of impoverishment which are in nature individual-subjective, temperamental (it is personal character which brings one to not forge social/supportive relations) or psychological, “besides external events” (worker at the Siloe di Caritas Ambrosiana); new poverty seems to often be associated by these social workers to urban choices, to socio-politico-economic characteristics, to a vulnerability which “expands” and becomes social, to the “chronicity, to the day-to-day, to the familiarity of uncertainty” (Negri, 2006, p. 15, author’s translation). If these more articulated significations generally given to the phenomenon seem necessary to work alongside stories of impoverishment, in the narratives of those interviewed they appear to be insufficient to guide one’s way out of precariousness: because of the difficulty in detecting new processes of impoverishment, which are becoming more complex and are increasing; because of the difficulty in accessing social services by a population not accustomed to dealing with the welfare system; because of the difficulty of social services to renew themselves in order to address the changes of social context, to which they are in danger of giving a “solution that does not meet the need” (social worker in Milan); because of the significations and social representations that revolve around both the new poor and social services themselves which (and other needs of the citizens) they should be relating to.

Specifically, the interviewed social workers perceive a difficulty in networking which is also due to “competition” of the private social, to competitive rationale linked to a historical fragmentation of funding and the logic of welfare funds (planner for the Fondazione Cariplo). This networking struggle means that one tends to offer the same answers to the same needs and the same people, who elude data collection: “homeless people in Milan are the most obese, because they eat 15 times a day,” is the extreme observation of the workers at Spazio Aperto Servizi, who also report the over answering to some needs, while others seems to remain unresolved (worker at the social custody project of the social cooperative Spazio Aperto Servizi). Therefore some link this “inertia” of social services to such struggles, but also to the welfare funds system and more in general to politics, some of which are excessively welfarist, as in part was the REI (social inclusion income) and as the Reddito di Cittadinanza (Basic Income Guarantee) is often considered (social worker in Milan). It is these welfare-based politics, along with the spreading of a neoliberal culture (Kumar, 2000), which also seem to have educational repercussions on the perception of the “poor,” who often take on the likeness of “clients” (job coaching worker in Milan), and of the services they turn to. It is within such a framework that social services seem to report problems in providing coherent answers to new needs, also due to politics and a welfare system that seems to go over the operators’ heads, creating a sense of impotence and inefficiency, an emergency intervention which is not pre-emptive in a more collective framework.