Charities

[Owen-]

Tomorrow I have an english group oral assignment - on charities. I have heard you guys going on about how charities etc. are a bad thing, and I was wondering if I could use your argument in my discussion.

The question is:

Giving donations to Third World charities is a waste of time. Its really only a drop in the ocean." Does your group agree with this comment? After you have delt with the issues involved, prepare a similar two sentence statement summarising your conclusions.

Any ideas on this?

[Owen-]

Also are there any charities that set up factories to give those living in 3rd world conditions pay?

Cheers

[Mujer Libre]

I'd look at the fact that charity doesn't fix the system that perpetuates inequality in the first place. Reading up about development theory might be good- particularly dependency theory and related schools of thought.

[pave_the_planet]

charities are set up to make the person giving the charity look like a really awesome person, and the person receiving the charity look like a loser who cant help themselves. the one whos donating is portrayed as someone whos so well off they that he can support himself and family as well as someone else.

and like what was said above, they do nothing to actually fix problems.

[Dros]

Charities are a way of creating two things: 1.) a way for the Bourgeoisie to pretend they give a shit about the poor and 2.) to create an artificial and ineffective "solution" to capitalism in the eyes of the masses.

[Dominicana_1965]

Marx on bourgeois socialism (charities and the like)

Chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto, section 2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism:


A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.


To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.


We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophis de la Misère as an example of this form.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.


By the way heres a good piece on some of the contradictions on "charity":

http://www.freepeoplesmovement.org/fpm/page.php?320

[Niccolò Rossi]

I would agree with the opinions given above especially by Trinitario with his quotation from the Manifesto.

I of course acknowledge that at least to some degree charities and humanitarian aid can serve to sooth the ills of society and alleviate suffering, but this is as far as it can go. It can in no way cure them. I stress that charity does not do a world of good, but I really don't think it is some form of evil that literally harms the proletariat or any other class. (Although I think there are situations where this can occur)

What it is is ineffective and our focus as revolutionaries must not be on alleviating the ills of society through charity or the like, but on destroying the current system and replacing it with socialism

[Winter]

Charities are a way of creating two things: 1.) a way for the Bourgeoisie to pretend they give a shit about the poor and 2.) to create an artificial and ineffective "solution" to capitalism in the eyes of the masses.

Agreed. What it comes down to is that charities are not even needed. A real solution to problems is out there, but the wealthy elite will be required to give up there power voluntarily, which they obviously won't do.