[Peace-discuss] History Happens Now...

[pengdust at aol.com]

A couple interesting side notes on precarity...

Prekariat - The social class,
not necessarily poor or members of a particular underclass, disposed
towards precarity. The prekariat is the post-Fordist analogue of the
proletariat.


Catholic Origins


In its English usage, Precarity was first used by Léonce Crenier, a Catholic monk who had previously been active as an anarcho-communist. In 1952 the term was used by Dorothy Day, writing for the Catholic Worker Movement:



"True poverty is rare," a saintly priest writes to us from
Martinique. "Nowadays communities are good, I am sure, but they are
mistaken about poverty. They accept, admit on principle, poverty, but
everything must be good and strong, buildings must be fireproof,
Precarity is rejected everywhere, and precarity is an essential element
of poverty. That has been forgotten. Here we want precarity in
everything except the church. (...) Precarity enables us to help very
much the poor. When a community is always building, and enlarging, and
embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for
the poor. We have no right to do this as long as there are slums and
breadlines somewhere.[3].




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