We've been waiting for this change of strategy from Oxfam

Oxfam tells us that they’re going to stop fighting poverty and concentrate on the battle against inequality instead:

Why Fighting Inequality Is at the Heart of Oxfam’s New Global 10-Year Strategy

They really are quite clear about it:

We used to talk only about poverty. No more.

Those who merely wish to alleviate poverty out of that desire to aid a fellow human will have to look elsewhere then.

Oxfam’s new mission is that we will fight inequality to end poverty and injustice.

We’ve seen this before. Here at home in the UK. There was a time when all points left - and classical liberals were definitely part of that back then even as we insist we are now - wanted to alleviate poverty. So, that’s what was alleviated. As Barbara Castle pointed out in 1959, destitution was a thing of the past by then. We did in fact go and conquer that poverty. By economic growth, the thing best promoted by capitalist free marketry.

Much of the rest of the world still suffered it of course. Then that neoliberal globalisation took hold and we had the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of our species. Current best guesses are that it’ll be entirely gone, that $1.90 a day destitution, within the decade. That happening as it did here domestically, economic growth through capitalist free marketry.

That domestic disappearance was a problem for those who wanted something to moan about. Therefore the definition of poverty was changed to a relative measure - to inequality. Now we’re seeing the same internationally. What point an international organisation, like Oxfam, to beat poverty if poverty is beaten? Quick, quick, change the goal so that there’s a reason for the continued existence of the corpus bureaucraticae.

There has to be, after all, some reason why those against capitalist free marketry can have an excuse to agitate against capitalist free marketry. If that neoliberal globalisation has beaten poverty then find something else. Without, of course, celebrating or even acknowledging the victory caused by that thing so despised.

We would say that this is a bureaucracy thrashing around to find a reason for its continued existence. But then we would say that, wouldn’t we?

Look on the bright side though. If the rich world upper middle classes who actually get those indoors, no heavy lifting, jobs at Oxfam insist that a new justification for their gravy train must be found then we do indeed have good evidence that poverty - proper, real poverty - is well on the way to being beaten, don’t we?

Just to hammer the point home:

Practically, we will focus on four interconnected areas: advocating for fairer, just economies; striving for gender justice and for the rights of women in all their diversities; pushing for climate justice; and ensuring that the powerful are held to account.

We would interpret that as they’re going to stop actually doing anything other than issuing press releases. Pity, they used to actually do some rather good actual work.