Today, most secular leftists do not propose that such absolute poverty can, will, or should be abolished or that North-South gaps can, will, or should be closed, let alone all exploitation and oppression be ended. (Those who still do have no idea how.) That is the reality.
[WS:] Yoshie, while I agree with much of you post here, the comments like above really throw me off. How on earth do you imagine that anyone, let alone the tiny and insignificant left can "abolish poverty." Like, poof, and the poverty goes away?
You may find it hard to accept, but a whole host of international bodies, from the UN to the World Bank, not to mention the x-ComeCon and bilateral agencies have been working really hard on abolishing poverty in the third world. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, of course, but for self-interest. Economic development is good for business and good for defense (or perhaps offense) - something that matters quite a bit to the powers that be. If they could do something to spur economic development and end poverty - not to bring universal happiness, mind you, but only to create more docile and productive labor force and better consumers - they would have done. They have vast resources and smartest brains working on it.
And yet most of those efforts have failed. They did so for a combination of various factors, some of them global, some of them local, some of them demographic, some of them geographic - but certainly not because of the lack of trying.
The end of poverty sentiment that you express is residual of the naïve 19th century belief in engineered progress - we can move mountains, redirect rivers, eradicate all ailments and diseases, and designs societies and humans to our liking or some abstract standard. Such a belief is hogwash that only Rush Limbaugh would explicitly mention today. Yet, the implicit assumption that "we" can redesign society and end all suffering by fiat or a revo runs deep into leftist consciousness.
I have no such illusions. While we can certainly do better, even much better than we are doing today, especially in the US - it is not possible to end all or even most social problems "by design" all the technological, organizational and material resources notwithstanding. Imperfection, indeterminacy, unforeseen circumstances, trade offs undesired side effect are integral parts of the human existence. Imagining life without them is nothing but a religious delusion.
Wojtek