Bactra Review    A Future for Socialism
It's almost a platitude that, for most of our history, abject want had a point: a very small number of people were able to lead civilized lives only by (why not use the word?) exploiting the many, and the margin was always slim. Whether this was justified, whether the products of civilization made up for the exploitation, is not a question I should like to have to answer. But, surely, this no longer applies; what is peculiar about extreme poverty in modern industrial economies is how little function it serves.