The Urban Household as a Multi-Product Firm

Any attempt at explaining urban poverty in the Caribbean in general and in Martinique in particular must at some point focus on the lower-class household or the extended family. It is the ‘factory’ where poverty is reproduced both on an everyday basis and transgenerationally. It is the family unit that has the power to help its members, to some degree, wage constant war against the several forms of material poverty they may experience. Scrutiny on the household as the locus of the reproduction of poverty is important on two grounds. On the one hand, the household functions as a microinstitutional basis of the reproduction of poverty and is the repository of the strategies that people develop to solve their problems. Second, such scrutiny reveals the structural constraints, generated by the wider system, that may have a direct impact on the failure or success of the struggle to overcome the burden of poverty. That second aspect will not be addressed fully here because it will require a sharper focus on the political economy of Martinique and on the ecology of state policies and politics.