A genre picture of bourgeois class society:
[Broadcast on GegenStandpunkt Marburg December 17, 2003]
Every year has a charity boom in the Christmas season again. Traditionally, in order to efficiently bring in donations, the worldly advisors of the state-faithful moral subjects, the newspapers, do their Christmas civic duty alongside the churches. In their well known Advent relief work, they present their fellow citizens fallen into distress as “bad luck” stories, thus making their contribution to Christmas selflessness by giving others the opportunity to help; in the form of contributing small amounts of money to one of the numerous donation funds.
The humanitarian reporters of misery bring forward the whole brutality of our unsoiled class state without having to fear that they will release a wave of outrage in an angry population. Newspapers which day after day rail against the overextended demands of the population’s “entitlements mentality,” castigate wages as “too high” and describe as “unaffordable” the expenses for “handouts” that massively and continuously result for the work force, suddenly describe old age and illness as disasters that make life almost impossible for the affected persons. Old age? But old age would probably not be so tragic if one had enough money to make life pleasant! What is so terrible about old age if one has lived life leisurely? One only has to look at the artists, clerics, professors and politicians in their late sixties and mid-seventies bursting with vigor who simply do not want to grow old! Disease? Nevertheless, there are probably doctors who exist who could take care of one.
“Karen's father became ill, so she had to give up her job. Since then the married couple with their three small daughters live off a small pension. It was necessary to move into a house that was much too small …” and so on and so on.
The necessities for life are refused to these people after they had the bad luck of not being useful any more. If an illness lasts any longer than – or is more serious than – a winter head cold, then one’s profitable existence as a wage earner quickly comes to an end. After the layoff one gets inspected for un-usefulness in the mesh of the social safety net, and there the state executes the same judgment over a person one more time: money for extra mouths only to survive – every cent for this is really a pity. That is also why proving a claim authorization is organized as an obstacle course: Mrs. F. (79), who is not at all useful, is “still spry” and “still goes in nice weather five kilometers to the doctor on foot," freely reports the following experience with the state austerity program to the newspapers:
“She was sent from one place to the next. She was registered altogether for little more than 300 Euros. Since the renovation of her apartment the rent already amounts to a good 200 Euros.”
To broadcast so bluntly the state’s meanness towards the grandma, without even a single bad word being said about the state, assumes something that everybody holds as normal in our beautiful republic; the fact that one must manage within the living conditions set by the state. The fact that this normality is based on poverty, on permanent exclusion from wealth, without which one would not have to go to work every day again and again, does not disturb someone who is content if he can just get by – with whatever tricks he must always come up with for it. Real poverty begins for him only when someone with the best intentions in the world no longer gets by. That is then considered an “extreme case,” an exception that has nothing to do with the usual gluttony of the wage worker's existence. One can endure this, so it is a condition which one sticks out no longer simply on account of the results of the daily grind for a beggarly payment allowing no future security, but something else: hard luck poverty.
So the reason for the cases of poverty in which the Christmastime Christians warm their hearts is happily chopped off, while wage labor and its consequences are broken down according to the degree of their ability to be endured. Poverty is looked at as an accident which people experience for no reason, as a consequence of a number of different adverse circumstances. Unemployment as bad luck, the pension cut as an additional aggravating condition which accompanies the loneliness and depression of the death of a husband, the divorce of a daughter, disease and disability – all this appears orderly and equally side by side. So trying circumstances function as causes of poverty, and nobody wants to see that such “twists of fate” only become vital threats to those who have nothing with which to protect their livelihood, who therefore have to live from the sale of their labor for a wage that covers neither the expenses of a divorce nor a fourth child nor still less longer phases of inability to work – if they actually have the dubious luck of finding work at all.
This law applies in capitalism: anyone who does not work, although no other means of acquisition is provided for him, does not eat. The radical citizen's consciousness intensifies this into the moral slogan: whoever does not work does not deserve to eat. Accordingly, the modern Christian has requirements for cases of compassion. Not every case of poverty stimulates his compassion. A “professional student,” e.g., someone who struggles by after a fashion with casual labor, or an immigrant who travels more than thousand kilometers to beg for a few dollars in the Christmas bustle and is promptly exposed by the press as a “scrounge,” instead of arousing pity receive rather the reproach of belonging to the “afraid to work rabble.”
One sees that philanthropy is oriented by no means towards commiserating with every destitute situation, but makes its conditions clear: someone who has become impoverished deserves compassion only if he can be proven innocent. The biography of a victim of poverty 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. Christmas relief work takes into account this brutal condition of Christian compassion in an exemplary manner, by reporting mainly cases in which those affected perform at peak effort in enduring their jam; e.g.:
“The new job took a lot of more energy than what seemed necessary to her. ‘I worked like a man,’ she says. Then, however, sometimes the body no longer cooperates …”
Here genuine misfortune is clearly present. The Christmas-spirit urge to help represents itself in the deposit of good coin.
This moneybag clutching should be helpful? If one took this seriously, one would almost have to despair: charity changes nothing in the causes of poverty, after its consumption it remains exactly the same as before. This already makes the good conscience of the Christmas philanthropist no longer so rightfully joyous on the way to the bank and while filling out the donation forms. The unchristian lukewarm urge to donate during the rest of the church year must occur to one here, whether one wants it to or not – a point where one could notice that charity does not reduce poverty, otherwise it would not have to be continuously given again and again. Instead of giving oneself a bad conscience and comparing oneself with Mother Teresa who is busy the whole Christian year caring for the capitalistically produced, world-wide hungry bellies and corpses, one should pause here for reflection: should one really accompany the production of misery by the state and capital with one’s own bad conscience so that it can continue more unabashedly? Ultimately, one only supplements the victimization of others with one’s own. One should not let it be put across that the “poor” are only really lacking our help, and protest against such cynical images as the following:
“Help can be just a step in the jostle, a gesture, a simple sentence, a sign that one sees a fellow human being, that one does not look past him. Help ... causes more than only the alleviation of acute distress. It also diminishes this desperate feeling of such complete abandonment …” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
Here it is brazenly suggested that one should go to an any grandma who gets to feel that no need for her exists, simply for the fun of demonstrating that, nevertheless, she would yet again be needed and would be loved (a decent love in which one asserts a claim in appreciation of services!).
So help is brought to its meager core: it is the affected recognition of the moral value of the needy.