Our Original Sin Was to be Born

For the unemployed, what to do with oneself is a daily dilemma. For those who have no safety net, no family to turn to, no spare bed to count on, it's easily an upset to the balance (even in the wealthiest country in the world!) between having and not having decent shelter and living conditions, adequate food and water sources, a means to feed one's family, and so on, delineating unto the extreme of the socio-economic spectrum, one of daily terror and survival. For those of us who have those things, some security, we bide our time, but with no study vision. Does action require vision? Perhaps for the poet. But this is not a landscape for poetry, the job market. We're each of us born with an outstanding debt--just like the Christian dogma of Original Sin--to the established system, order and caste of cold hard cash. That is to say, Capital. Our original sin was to be born. (In a capitalist order, at that!)


Genuine humanism pre-supposes providing for the needs of human beings in a structural way--a way that cannot be rolled back or undone, anymore than can be the historical abdication of divine rule by monarchs, or the felling of absolutism, in its previous manifestations. Times seem to bare witness to the pretext of revolution, whether peaceful (as in Madison or Cairo) or armed (as in Libya; as in Nepal, lest we forget); the striving toward social and economic justice, in sway to the momentum that old revolutionaries and hard-line leftists referrenced as "a living history."*
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*"It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law .... has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science..."  -Friedrich Engels,
from Preface to the Third German Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte