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what are you talking about?
where to start?
you act as though there is equal access for everyone to adequate education in the states--which is patently false.
you act as though there are no structural reasons--political reasons--in the states for maintaining people in poverty. which is patently false.
you act as though poverty or marginalization are to be understood by blaming the poor--which is patently ridiculous.
you act as though the welfare state can be understood as nothing more than taking from one person and giving to another for no reason--which is ridiculous as well--the redistribution of wealth through the mechanism of the welfare system was the result of extended periods of conflict between the holders of capital and working people--the compromise arrived at articulated the idea that capitalism should enable a society to crawl out from the barbarism caused by a radically unequal distrubtion of wealth, that there is a content to notions of economic and social justice--that capitalism is NOT a system that provides the greatest good for the greatest number without some kind of state intervention. the state--for better of worse--expanded into these areas in order to INCREASE the domain of political action, of public input--what arguments like wonderwench's entail is a return to the most barbaric versions of capitalism, like what you might know about from the london of the mid 19th century--radical separation of the classes, no future whatsoever for people not born into privilege, and a repressive police apparatus whose primary function is to crush any attempt at protest, at organization, not to speak of revolt....
i assume that people who endorse this kind of position imagine that they would somehow be born into privilege themselves so that this barbaric capitalism would be cool with then, in the same way that people who are part of the society for creative anachronism imagine that the mideval period would have been kinda cool because everyone would be a baron or duke.
what would do you, wonderwench--eliminate the poor?
open up some nice camps for them to hang out in for a while?
maybe you wouldnt--what i suspect you would do in fact is simply not look at the consequences of your politics, were they to become implemented, that you would be pretty much unconcerned about what happened to the people who would be sent into a void in the real or metaphorical sense by your politics.
you mention some "problem"---what **is** this problem you talk about? the idea that citizenship means something, that citizenship is not identicial with economic position? and why should it be?
if the underlying premise of your argument is that somehow or other the poor, for example, are ignorant or have been manipulated, i have to say that your own politics as i have understood them from your posts do not put up a very compelling argument that your position is elaborated on a different basis. and that seems to have little to do with economic status...you seem to contradict your own position yourself.....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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