>F. Engels wrote in his 1886 intro to CAPITAL vol I:
>
>The sighed for period of prosperity will not come; as
>often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms,
>so often do they again vanish into air. Meanwhile,
>each succeeding winter brings up afresh the great
>question, "what to do with the unemployed"; but while
>the number of the unemployed keeps swelling from year
>to year, there is nobody to answer that question; and
>we can almost calculate the moment when the
unemployed
>losing patience will take their own fate into their
>own hands.
The dilemma is, as someone has pointed out, the poor are all guilty of something. This serves a very useful purpose in keeping them from organising to "take their own fate into their own hands". Few leaders can arise from the ranks of the poor who cannot be easily destroyed by bringing them to account for the sins they must necessarily commit to survive.
Engels may have failed to see this.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
******************************************************
As Scrooge pointed out, there *are* 'workhouses' (aka prisons) for the poor, the vagrant and the misfits. The violent among those criminalized by poverty are usually the ones who've sensed that stealing is at the heart of successful mastery in the chumpchange-system. Heads of State all over the world socialize their morlocks by example and many learn the lesson well : political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun.
YFTSR,
Mike B)
===== ***************************************************************** "My sister, your grain - its beer is tasty, my comfort.." - Song of Songs; Sumeria, 2100 B.C.
As to the power of Egyptian brews Aristotle observed:
"They who have drunk beer...fall on their back...for they who get drunk on other intoxicating liquors fall on all parts of their body...it is only those who get drunk on beer who fall on their backs and lie with their faces upwards."
"She brews good ale, and thereof comes the proverb, Blessing of your heart, you brew good ale."
- Shakespeare
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com