It is exactly fifty years ago that Oscar Lewis’ famous book on poverty ‘The Children of Sanchez’ was published in Mexico. It created huge problems, not only because the children of Sanchez openly spoke of sexuality in a very conservative country, but also because ‘a foreigner’ had shown there was real poverty in a ‘modern’ and ‘developing’ city like Mexico’s capital.

One anthropologist then wondered: is poverty research subversive?

To-day, we have to wonder if anything has changed. Poverty is on the global agenda, we almost daily see hungry babies in Africa, labouring kids in factories in Asia, dying homeless people in the streets, even in Europe. And we know there is more than enough food, there are more than enough available adult workers, and there is more than enough wealth to give everyone a life in dignity.

But can we discuss it?

Those who try to blame an economic system for the poverty it creates are rapidly put aside as ‘extremists’, or ‘populists’. If they refuse to go along with discourses on poverty as ‘cognitive taxes’ or ‘risk-averse people’ or people ‘lacking voice’, they are said to refuse to tackle the really existing problems. They abandon the poor!

Yet, can anyone seriously continue to claim that the international community is ‘fighting poverty’? That tremendous success has been booked (look at the MDGs!), but that a long path remains to be walked (we will have SDGs!)?

Half of the world population is poor. Massive wealth is concentrated in the hands of 0,001 % of the world population.

Millions of people are craving for a job and a decent income. Millions of people are making debts in  order to buy a Christmas present for their children. Is this a just world?

But can we talk about social justice? Or do we have to continue to do as if research on multidimensional poverty will finally bring the solutions?  As if inequality should not be discussed? Can we continue to do as if politics had nothing to do with it? As if neoliberal austerity was the one neutral solution bringing welfare to all?

In 2015 the world is still stuck with the knowledge produced by the World Bank and other UN organisations beginning of the 1990s, telling us poverty is a problem of individuals that have been excluded from growth and development. That women were ‘the poorest of the poor’ while in fact they are just the ones doing the hardest work and getting the worst or no pay at all.

These same institutions are now promoting ‘social protection’ while they first eroded the concept and made it into an instrument at the service of growth and of markets.

We should stop this masquerade. We should look at the structural causes of poverty and inequality and claim policies that tackle these causes.

In 2001 the World Social Forum said: ‘Another World is possible’. Today, many people know they will have to make this ‘other world’ themselves. History is in their hands, and they know it. Time has come. We should act  before poverty becomes a behavioural problem. Before inequality will be said to be unavoidable. Before taxes will be said to be immoral. We should act before climate change will be making an end to life on earth.

Because there are alternatives.