Who can they mean?
They endeavour to teach what they have not learned to quote from Marx's letter to Bracke, Liebknecht and others (1875).
We say to you,"Can you not stop being a harbinger of doom harping on about things that you do not understand? Can you not see the person behind the label?"
People are people and many change their class.
The classification as lumpen derives from Marx. The classes of Marx and others, notably the Church socialists,are not fixed in time and space.
Ignore bar-room spoofers and pontificating bores. If you have difficulty understanding labour and classes and democratic socialist politics,begin with workers as wage labourers and poor people as poor people. Proceed from there.
Income differentials as between the working class and the poor who are sustained by welfare doles have narrowed in those countries whose ruling class Marx agitated against. In those which have not followed his doctrines of social justice,the multi-millionaires pay no more than 25% income tax and flat rate taxation advocates are winning out. In the latter instance,I point to the United States.
Income narrowing between high-paid worker and unemployed and the poor owes nothing to modern trade unions. Those changes are due to political intervention. Trade unions and the trade union bureaucracy are largely irrelevant because of modern narrow-minded approaches to the resolution of social conflicts in society as between wages and welfare rates.
The passage of equal pay legislation and minimum wage acts and the development of social initiatives in Europe have seen off most revolutionary political conflicts between the classes.
In Germany,first land of state capitalism (and a measure of social insurance) Marxists are viewed as extremists.
Elsewhere income equity is the outcome of democratic socialism at a political level.
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28.2.2024
The conscientious objectors
Britain's trajectory towards chaos proceeds with attempts to turn all government critics into mendicants. Roped into that category of undeserving poor are Welsh miners,Irish republicans and English socialists.
A clerical supplement to the poor
The Church's future lies in the gospel of the poor and dispossessed. That is its traditional mission here in Ireland.
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1.5.2024
The Papacy. Moral theology
As between worker and poor,the Catholic Church preaches a preferential option for the poor. The Victorian capital expansion and social dichotomy which originates with the breakdown of feudalism led to the growth of great differentials in income. Those differences were consolidated by government,employers and,latterly,trade unions, all.
Modern times
Anyone who thinks that a trade union official or officials or,on the other side of the equation,a shopkeeper, doctor or lawyer gives a fig for the poor is fooling himself. They certainly do not.
However,the Church does not regard a poor person as an "eejit" and regards a trade union official or "revolutionary socialist" as "someone who may have to be killed" (Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo X111).
Reflections
While the socialist and socialists of a democratic type regard the clergy of all faiths as irrelevant and as Jesus referred to them,"blind guides",few criticise their traditional support for organised charity. In practice the Catholic Church's preferential option for the poor exists without lowering expectations for the many or reversing social gains for the poor.
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