Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 10:39:33 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Feeding the poor


In message <199710240003.UAA26458-AT-pobox.ids.net>, Louis R Godena
<louisgodena-AT-ids.net> writes
>
>Paul Gallagher
>
>>I'll bet $5 Mr. Godena is about to undergo a political transformation. 
>>Neo-con within 5 years? I'll check back here in 2002.
>
>
>To maintain a class-conscious state solely for the purpose of relieving the
>wants of poor people has always seemed to me to be antithetical to Marxism.
>Further, it neglects the political difference between the perpetually poor
>and those who rank as members of the working class, and in whose hands
>revolutionary change ostensibly rests.

All praise to Lou Godena for this excellent post (and its predecessor).
The reduction of the left to the status of welfare advocates is a
throughly demoralising move. Not far beneath the surface of the
professional welfare administrators' mock sympathy for the poor is a
hatred for the great mass of people who work hard to get a living. In
Britain the Rowntree Trust recently wrote a report blaming the 'work
rich' for monopolising all the work to the detriment of the poor. This
feint of an attack the working class thinly disguised as sympathy for
the poor has been adopted by many in the chattering classes, such as the
Real World Coalition, an umbrella group of charities that published a
manifesto before the elections here, calling for a reduction in
consumption amongst the 'moderately well off' - code for a cut in wages.
And all of this parcelled up as sympathy for the poor.

In an early essay Marx said of England's poor laws that poverty was so
endemic in England that they made it into an institution. Today more
than then, the state rewards people for presenting themselves in the
guise of victim, because that is how it likes them.

Fraternally
-- 
James Heartfield


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