‘Functional Poverty’

 Mildred Binns Young, a Quaker thinker, urged young people to adopt a life of “functional poverty.”

She argued that Americans had developed “a social system which can thrive only on victims.” The social order constantly finds new ways to exploit people. When indentured servants weren’t profitable enough, the society warmed up to the idea of enslaved servants. It later found ways to exploit successive waves of immigrants, forcing people to work long hours for inadequate wages.

During the Depression, Mildred and Wilmer Young helped organize the Delta Cooperative Farm in Mississippi. The co-op was integrated. It was organized to lift exploited sharecroppers — Black and white — out of exploitive conditions.

Mildred Young argued that thoughtless consumption made that kind of social system not only possible but inevitable. She urged people to do without “servants” — maids, housecleaners, lawn keepers. If your way of living is so complicated you can’t handle the maintenance, simplify.

The idea that the United States is a Christian nation is beyond troubling to me. I’ve been reading what  some American religious thinkers have said about what a better social order would look like.

• Mildred Binns Young, “Functional Poverty”; Pendle Hill Pamphlet No. 6, 1939. Pendle Hill is still publishing pamphlets at its bookstore. This one is in the public domain and can be found here:

https://inwardlight.org/witness/simplicity/functional-poverty/