27 أغسطس 2012

Poverty

 “Poverty is my glory”
الفقر هو مجد بلادي


By Majid Rahnema is a diplomat and former Minister of Iran, born in 1924 in Tehran. He represented Iran at the UN from 1957 to 1971. He works on problems of poverty and production processes of poverty by the market economy cont. here wikipedi

What we call aid money serves only to strengthen the structures that generate poverty. Aid money never reaches those victims who, having lost their real assets, look for alternative ways of life outside the globalised system of production which are better suited to their needs

That is since the 1970s -- that my main objection to development focuses on its rituals. These generate not just specific goals like "education" or "transportation," but a non-ethical state of mind. Inevitably, this wild-goose chase transforms the good into a value; it frustrates present satisfaction (in Latin, enough-ness) so that one always longs for something better that lies in the "not yet source here 


The Post – Development Reader
 
By Majid Rahnma(Author) Victoria Bawtree (Author)
The University Press Limited (UPL)  here 

INTRODUCTION-Majid-Rahnema here

he Modernization of Poverty and Destitution
The new mode of production introduced by the Industrial Revolution represented a total
sociological and epistemological break in most fields of human activity. It was at the root
of a radical shift in perception about “wealth” and “poverty”, as these terms had been
understood until then. By systematically producing new needs, it dealt a fatal blow to the
almost organic equilibrium that characterized vernacular societies. This was followed by
a profound change in the culturally established norms that had served to distinguish the
essential from the non-essential.
Poverty Modernized: A Direct Product of the New Mode of Production
Modernized poverty is thus as much the result of multiple breaks caused by the
establishment of the new mode of production as it is of pressures, mirages and
expectations related to the promises made by the new economy. These phenomena
had the effect of confronting the losers of this new order with a type of induced scarcity
for which they were unprepared
What is radically new in this condition is the fact that for the first time in history, the technoeconomic system imposed on society, which was supposed to guide it towards affluence

Editor’s note her  e Address delivered at the Philia Symposium, Orford, QC
October 2003
Translated from the French by Mariette Lemay
 

Seminar on Anti-Systemic Movements 1: The Power of the Poor
Posted: January 2, 2012 in Seminar: Planet Earth: Anti-Systemic Movements       
Tags: anti-systemic social movements, EZLN 3
Progress, False Promise by the Rich to Loot the Poor

 ** Seminar in Chiapas about the parameters imposed by power

** After 18 years, indigenous communities still confront war

By: Hermann Bellinghausen, Envoy

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, December 30, 201

here  

Oakland Table – Majid Rahnema: Poverty

revolution” can provide humans with master plans of salvation. Instead, any concerned community
(
or person) can become a powerful agent of change. In other words, the regeneration of everyone’s riches is in one’s own hands. For culturally constituted groups, this can be done through small but meaningful daily activities, through the power of convivial and creative relations with their fellow humans on the very sites where they are threatened in their dignity

searching with others the thousands of possible liberating alternatives that the modern digital world is presently preventing them to discover. For the “poor” and the “dropouts” of modernity – whose number may now be more than four billion people -, the two classical verses of the great Persian poet Hâfiz could be an inspiring light for their personal path: Referring to Jâmi jam, the crystal ball of King Jamshîd that could show him all the secrets of the world, he said,  “For years, my heart was asking me to provide it with the jâmi jam. [He was not aware that] it was asking from others what he had in itself

 

dowmload for PDF here 

Destitution, or imposed poverty, no doubt hurts, degrades and drives people into desperation. In many places, hunger and misery cry to heaven. Indeed, few development concepts find their proof in such a glaring reality. Yet poverty is also a myth, a construct and the invention of a particular civilization." Majid Rahnema

"Life is not a void to be filled. It is a plenitude to be discovered." Christoph Eberhard


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