FREE ESSAY ON ARE THE POOR LAZY

ARE THE POOR LAZY

The poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy; it is quite as simple as that. Of
course, it is true that there are exceptions, but there is to every rule. However, in the
case of the poor, as a group, they are all too often seen as groups deserving of
sympathy. In fact, when a street peddler holds out his hand, some people feel too guilty
to pass him by without giving him even a little bit of change. After all, he is so much
worse off than they.
The sociologists Karl Marx looked at life through an economist's eyes but he had the
heart of a philosopher. His ideas about the ordering of society had much to do with
economics as well as with morality and much of these may be found in the Marx-Engel's
reader. However, to get to the heart of the matter, Marx's and Engel's Communist
Manifesto provides the ultimate position on poverty.
The reason why there are poor people, to Marx, is capitalism itself. This is true even
though capitalism is supposedly part of a grand scheme where eventually communism would
reign. In the mean time, with capitalism, business owners live well while workers are
much like slaves, living a life of alienation. Marx and Engel said, in The Communist
Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the
priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers". Anyone can see this
idea is as old as time. Even today, doctors have been reduced to paid wage laborers,
particularly with the advent of HMOs. The profession has been made corrupt by money. No
longer can physicians practice, as they would like as they are tied into this system of
beurocracy that is in today's world.
Here, it is also seen that the essence of man is destroyed by a class war. One can no
longer take pride in his or her own work as everything is reduced to a price. And that is
what Marx saw as indicative of a system of government that did not value individual
contribution. It is almost as if the workers are imprisoned and surely they have no
choice. In society today, does the Wal Mart cashier or exotic dancer really have a
choice? If they did, would they be participating in demeaning or demoralizing work, day
after day, that does not allow them to reach their full human potential?
Marx had written so extensively on the unfairness of capitalism that his motivation could
only be that he cared a great deal about ethics and morality. What he saw going on around
him was immoral and that prompted his writings, which appear largely economic. Underlying
the talk about politics and money are very real concerns about the poorer factions. This
comes through in much of his writings.
While it is true that Marx had a Robin Hood type of philosophy, he would not have
tolerated laziness. In fact, the point on which the Manifesto is based is that wage
laborers were virtually slave laborers. To Marx, this was wrong. Yet even in Marx's
model, there is no room for laziness. He did not point to a bum on the street and feel
sorry for him. Rather, he pointed to the people working long hours for low wages, people
who were not lazy at all. To Marx, the lazy poor would deserve what they would get. Sadly
his proposal for ultimate happiness is communism, which isn't like capitalism, though
dependent on it for an economic base. But he didn't say that all poor people are lazy but
he did see a class division based on distribution of power, which was something that they
didn't control. Maybe Marx made a conscious decision in not going over the issue of
laziness specifically, however it is apparent what he thought on the subject, but one can
only imagine what he really thought.
Bibliography
Marx, Karl and Engel's Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto, New York: Bantam books,
1992.
Tucker, Robert C. The Marx-Engel's Reader, New York: W.W. Norton &Co., 1978
Macionis, John. Sociology Eighth Edition, pg96-101, New Jersey: Kenyon College, Prentice
Hall