culture & poverty again

[Chuck Grimes]

Wall Street Journal - July 13, 1999

THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF POVERTY

By Lawrence E. Harrison, a senior fellow at Harvard University's 
Academy for International and Area Studies. His most recent book is 
"The Pan-American Dream" (Basic Books, 1996).
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The course of human progress demonstrates that some cultures produce 
greater good for greater numbers than others. Both at home and in the 
Third World, the antipoverty agenda must address values and 
attitudes, as difficult and as painful as it may be. The process will 
be slow, but it offers hope that the War on Poverty can, in due 
course, be won.
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Doug,

Why do you post this shit? 

God, over and over we read the same crap, cranked out by the ton from
the whitewing capital uber alles clones. Why can't they at least be
more inventive. This is the figging nineties. 

Its always 'about values' and the 'moral crisis', and never about
institutional capitalism and its neoliberal political lackeys--running
dog butt apologists and their lick-spittle policies that make it all
come out that way--no, couldn't be that simple. It has to be some
mysterious cultural thing--sleepy latin fatalism, the angry and
criminal left-overs of slavery, or some other personal and
individually accountable problem. Obviously, the solution is always
the same--change the people, not the system--hell we all know the
system works fine, it's the people who are fucked up.

Well, 'as difficult and as painful as it may be' I would suggest we
address Mr. Harrison's bloody crisis of values with a gun. But, hey,
that's my seething hostility, violent temper, YY psycho-sexual
aggression genetics, and slow witted, white trash self speaking. Must
be the Irish Catholic ner'do'well branch of the family tree who drank,
fought, and fucked their lives away into oblivion. Oh, yeah, and
they beat their kids too.

The more reasonable English and Welsh Protestant branch whose lives
were just as short, but who had a lot less fun living--those hard
working believers speak in entirely different terms.

Imagine that capitalism as the totality of a socio-economic system
acts as a selectivity filter, extracting from a broad selection of
cultural traditions and skills available--only those that will suit
its immediate ends--the maximization of profit. Skewed income levels
and poverty then appear as by-products of this selection process and
represent those traditions and skills that are determined to be of a
lesser or of no utility to such a system. Alternatively, certain
skills and labor are essential, but are required in such large
quantities, that the only way to keep profits going up requires that
this work be continually degraded--hence the rising sea of low income
labor at the bottom.

So, ideological propagandists like Mr. Harrison, then construct moral
arguments as to why certain traditions and skills are worth less, and
attach words like worthless, unskilled, fatal, criminal, violent,
mean, lazy, and stupid where ever deemed appropriate. Meanwhile, under
the same rubric, whatever such a system is currently rewarding is
obviously a proven good in cash and so given over to words like
skilled, intelligent, smart, capable, productive, efficient,
worthwhile, and valuable.

There are endless nuances of this basic idea, but they all come down
to the same thing. We could for example detail out the consequences of
feed back loops which re-enforce, augment, and then exacerbate the
existing system and its processes.

Chuck Grimes