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The Cynicism of Liberal Charity Drives

On my way home from work, I was listening to NPR. The Christmas season always brings a charity boom. NPR tells its listeners that they have a chance to "help", to do something heart-warming. If the listener makes a donation, then NPR will donate to a regional food bank. One can apparently make a double whammy: with a small donation, you can fulfill your civic duty and help those in need. Donate a small amount, and the hungry will be given a few meals.

NPR reports on and presents the various cases of misery as mere "bad luck" stories. It's not only the hardworking who are forced to make choices between medicine or a car payment and putting food on the table who suffer from poverty, but also children and the elderly. NPR reports all kinds of cases of misery. The bills came in and one had no money. A son gets addicted to drugs and it takes everything from the family. On and on. Two things are striking: on the one hand, the way poverty is treated as if it were a natural misfortune. On the other, without having to fear that they will release a wave of outrage in an angry population, the humanitarian reporters of misery bring forward the whole brutality of "our" unblemished class state. It's disturbing how everybody regards masses of people going hungry as normal in our nice republic. No one even takes it as a condemnation of this society. No one thinks, "Holy shit, look at how completely irrational this form of economy is!"

It's just taken for granted that one must get by within the living conditions set by the state. That this normality is based on poverty, on a permanent exclusion from wealth which forces one to have to go to work every day, again and again until you croak. This normality isn't disturbing to someone who is content if he can just get by – with whatever tricks he always has to come up with. Real poverty begins apparently only when someone tries as best he can, but no longer gets by. That is considered an “extreme case,” an exception that has nothing to do with the ordinary gluttony of the wage worker's existence. Because that is something one can endure, it is a condition in which one is not simply toughing out the effects of the daily grind for a cheap wage that permits no security for the future, but something else: a poverty that is one's fate in life.

In the reporting on the widespread destitution, wage labor and its consequences are separated from the "really bad cases" to the extent that they are endurable. Poverty is seen as an accident that befalls people for no reason, as a consequence of a number of different adverse circumstances. The NPR reporters love to interject "how complicated and nuanced" it all is. Unemployment is bad luck, a pension cut is one more thing that goes along with the loneliness and depression of a husband's death, a daughter's divorce, a disease or a disability – all that seems untroubling and equitable when set next to each other. In this way, trying circumstances are said to be the causes of poverty, and nobody wants to see that such “twists of fate” only become life threatening if people have nothing to protect their livelihoods with; if they have to live by selling their labor for a wage that supports neither the expenses of a divorce or a second child, much less long phases of being unable to work – if they actually had the dubious luck of finding work at all.

NPR even broadcasts the psychology of the subjects who are in dire straights: they feel ashamed of needing handouts, and they feel ashamed of having pity taken on them. They never thought it would come to this. This "unbiased morality" is put on full display: whoever doesn't work doesn't deserve to eat. Accordingly, the giver of charity obviously has requirements for cases of compassion. Not every case of poverty stimulates his compassion. Not every case of destitution is deserving of concern or care. There are always conditions attached. For modern people, someone who has become poor deserves compassion only if he can be proven innocent. An impoverished person's life story is really only touching if it shows that he was subjected to the brutalities which capitalism has in such abundant supply for its working material up to the bitter end. Charity drives take into account this brutal condition for compassion in an exemplary manner by mainly reporting cases in which those affected do their utmost to endure their predicament. Thus NPR reports on all kind of people who gave it their all, yet nonetheless got chewed up and shit out.

NPR reports that for just 50 dollars, you can give someone 6 meals-- enough to last a weekend. If one took this seriously, one would almost have to despair: charity changes nothing in the causes of poverty. After it is consumed, it remains exactly the same as before. Charity does not reduce poverty, otherwise it would not have to be given over and over again every year as long as capitalism exists. Instead of giving oneself a bad conscience and comparing oneself to Mother Teresa, who busies herself the entire holiday season caring for the hungry bellies and corpses that capitalism produces all over the world, one should pause here for reflection: should one really support the production of poverty by the state and capital with one’s own bad conscience so that it can continue all the more unashamed?

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