Pope Francis declared 19 November 2017 as the First World Day of the Poor. It took the church long enough, didn't it?
Papa Frankie explains, "We know how hard it is for our contemporary world to see poverty clearly for what it is. Yet in myriad ways poverty challenges us daily, in faces marked by suffering, marginalization, oppression, violence, torture and imprisonment, war, deprivation of freedom and dignity, ignorance and illiteracy, medical emergencies and shortage of work, trafficking and slavery, exile, extreme poverty and forced migration. Poverty has the face of women, men and children exploited by base interests, crushed by the machinations of power and money. What a bitter and endless list we would have to compile were we to add the poverty born of social injustice, moral degeneration, the greed of a chosen few, and generalized indifference! Tragically, in our own time, even as ostentatious wealth accumulates in the hands of the privileged few, often in connection with illegal activities and the appalling exploitation of human dignity, there is a scandalous growth of poverty in broad sectors of society throughout our world. Faced with this scenario, we cannot remain passive, much less resigned...To all these forms of poverty we must respond with a new vision of life and society."
Indeed, there is a need for a vision for the future. The World Socialist Movement has one that it has been trying to convince well-meaning individuals for over a hundred years to accept and work towards. If we are one people we should be concerned about climate change, world poverty, and the global plight of refugees fleeing war-torn countries. If we are one people, from across the world we will come and take care of the elderly, the young and the frail and sick.
The most remarkable feature in modern life is the lack of interest displayed by working people in their economic condition. They seem to accept their status of beasts of burden as a matter of course, a state of affairs to be put up with without complaint or protest. A job of work seems to be the highest aspiration they have. Around that revolve their hopes and fears. A job of work brings them all the joy of life they ever know—food, clothing, shelter, some much-required leisure, and entertainment. For these things they start like horses on Monday morning, and finish like cows, complacently chewing the cud of future milking, by Friday. Fellow-workers appear to suffer from a poverty of spirit - fighting spirit. Docility seems to be the hall-mark of the “respectable” working men and women who have “something to be thankful for,” i.e., a job. Workers live to work. They are instruments for the production of profit. The bread they eat, the clothes they wear, the houses they live in, are not so much necessaries of life as necessaries for the production of that labour-power, that energy, which is to be expended in the creation of profit. And, the saddest thought of all, those who live only to labour and to exude profit, are so used to this aspect of life that they have become dead to the real meaning of the word socialism. Never has there been an epoch that has succeeded so completely in robbing vast populations of their lives, as under the wages system.
Fellow-workers, can you not see that you are being robbed of life.
Papa Frankie explains, "We know how hard it is for our contemporary world to see poverty clearly for what it is. Yet in myriad ways poverty challenges us daily, in faces marked by suffering, marginalization, oppression, violence, torture and imprisonment, war, deprivation of freedom and dignity, ignorance and illiteracy, medical emergencies and shortage of work, trafficking and slavery, exile, extreme poverty and forced migration. Poverty has the face of women, men and children exploited by base interests, crushed by the machinations of power and money. What a bitter and endless list we would have to compile were we to add the poverty born of social injustice, moral degeneration, the greed of a chosen few, and generalized indifference! Tragically, in our own time, even as ostentatious wealth accumulates in the hands of the privileged few, often in connection with illegal activities and the appalling exploitation of human dignity, there is a scandalous growth of poverty in broad sectors of society throughout our world. Faced with this scenario, we cannot remain passive, much less resigned...To all these forms of poverty we must respond with a new vision of life and society."
Indeed, there is a need for a vision for the future. The World Socialist Movement has one that it has been trying to convince well-meaning individuals for over a hundred years to accept and work towards. If we are one people we should be concerned about climate change, world poverty, and the global plight of refugees fleeing war-torn countries. If we are one people, from across the world we will come and take care of the elderly, the young and the frail and sick.
The most remarkable feature in modern life is the lack of interest displayed by working people in their economic condition. They seem to accept their status of beasts of burden as a matter of course, a state of affairs to be put up with without complaint or protest. A job of work seems to be the highest aspiration they have. Around that revolve their hopes and fears. A job of work brings them all the joy of life they ever know—food, clothing, shelter, some much-required leisure, and entertainment. For these things they start like horses on Monday morning, and finish like cows, complacently chewing the cud of future milking, by Friday. Fellow-workers appear to suffer from a poverty of spirit - fighting spirit. Docility seems to be the hall-mark of the “respectable” working men and women who have “something to be thankful for,” i.e., a job. Workers live to work. They are instruments for the production of profit. The bread they eat, the clothes they wear, the houses they live in, are not so much necessaries of life as necessaries for the production of that labour-power, that energy, which is to be expended in the creation of profit. And, the saddest thought of all, those who live only to labour and to exude profit, are so used to this aspect of life that they have become dead to the real meaning of the word socialism. Never has there been an epoch that has succeeded so completely in robbing vast populations of their lives, as under the wages system.
Fellow-workers, can you not see that you are being robbed of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment