it is also about modern day workhouses. historically, men have had workplaces (factories) in which to meet & organize whereas women have been separated in our mini-factories (homes). even if we worked doubledays in both factories, we were on the clock to get home, making meetings at factory or pub, difficult to attend. that’s not to say we haven’t met & organized, but it’s not been as easy. is that partly why our work is still not valued? and online homeworkers? the web is our factory and our meeting ground but where is our work protection? and is there now a greater blur between doubleday jobs?
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist
—Helder Camara
The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891






