Boris and Oscar on charity

Boris Johnson is setting up the charity to help fight child poverty.
The Mayor's Fund will ask companies and wealthy people for money to help tackle the capital's social problems and support families in need. Johnson has said the fund will move money from the "wealth-creating sector" to the "immense pockets of deprivation" throughout the capital.
During his election campaign he said: "In London there are loads of people who are making stonking quantities of dosh and they are, I think, well able to make a much more generous contribution to the wider community,"

The practice of social responsibility is at best an "add on" within capitalism . Digby Jones, on behalf of the CBI, is frank about this: "Actions that affect beneficially on society create an environment where people feel safer, and this helps business". They want to make it stronger by giving it a better image. Their basic motive is still the promotion of "wealth creation" . An industry has grown up around the idea and the practice of corporate social responsibility . Better to give back to the victims part of the proceeds of exploiting them than to be too greedy and to get a bad name.
The philanthropists and reformists are , as always, deluding themselves by thinking that the capitalist system can somehow be turned into a society where genuine community can flourish.

In The Soul of Man Under Socialism Oscar Wilde says :-

"Their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system from being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good . . . It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair."

Socialism is not about moralistic giving and self sacrifice, but a condition of society wherein helping others is the best way of helping ourselves though working to help others.

"...Charity, oh sweet Charity, one day we will deprive the capitalist class not only of their monopoly of wealth but you also will be removed from their benevolent custody and dispatched to the dark ages from whence you came!" - WSPNZ