Charities are Lousy Socialists

Oscar chillin out, prolly watching the 1891 SuperBowl or something.

Oscar Wilde didn’t much care for charity none.  He thought charities were part of the capitalist conspiracy.  He thought they were worse than the capitalists.  He says so right here in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, a rhapsody of the King’s English that streams with a rhythm and cadence the best rappers today would admire:

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. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Here is my take.  Capitalism could not survive without an economic underclass.  Can’t nobody be rich unless someone else is poor — many more people, it probably takes 25 poor people to make 1 rich person I bet.  Its simple math.  If we each have 50% of the pizza, neither of us is rich or poor.  For one of us to be rich — say 80% of the pizza — the other has to be poor with only 20%, assuming a finite pizza.  Nobody wants to be “the other.”

Wilde’s point is that if a charity comes along and gives the other recompense of some sort so that her relative deprivation is tolerable (and we convince her how good she has it by other means as well), she might not object and revolt.  It might be easier to tolerate the mitigated but still present inequality wrought not by fair competition, as capitalism asserts.  And thus charity aids and abets capitalism’s poverty by design.  Capitalism acknowledges charity with a wink and nod of thanks.  Its Poverty By Design and charities are unwitting co-conspirators:

The critique of charity as a failure to achieve social rights draws on the ideal that the welfare state is an aspiration to break away from the taint of the poor laws. Advocates of the welfare state maintain that it can be a mechanism to create social cohesion. The ideal of a tax-funded welfare state that provides resources on the basis of social rights sought to address the inadequacy of charity to meet basic need. Charity is not only inadequate to meet need; it is also experienced as shameful. This proposition resonates with Marshall’s classic remark that to access charity was to ‘cross the road that separated the community of citizens from the outcast company of the destitute’. Notwithstanding the limitations of charity, governments in numerous countries with advanced welfare states are increasingly turning to charity and volunteers to meet basic need. As we demonstrate, the move to charity is not solely driven by austerity and economic downturn. Instead, we show that it can be understood as an orchestrated government shift towards celebrating charity and the charitable.

A popular meme on social media

Now why would government celebrate charities and the charitable?  Why should government orchestrate?  And where is the sinister background music when you need it?  

darryll jones