
Bodies for Sale: The Inhuman Face of Industrialism
GUEST COLUMN
“You are worth about $5.50,” gloats the statistic-monger. “If you were cremated, the chemicals in your body wouldn’t be worth as much as a ticket to a first-class concert.”
“Four dollars an hour,” says my boss, equally pleased.
I do just enough unskilled factory work (for Manpower) to cover my room and board. The money itself doesn’t affront me, as if I had gotten a low bid at the auction block. But what does affront me is the suggestion that the money could in any way compensate me for my body, my life, my time, myself.
Raw materials went into the factory and came out ennobled and man went in and came out degraded (Pope Pius XI).
You May Also Enjoy
What Catholicism offers is a consistent vision of Love, which is sacrifice, while the world offers dreams of money, power, and fast pleasure.
Subsidiarity and solidarity were practiced in Cape Breton under the influence of the Catholic social-justice experiment, the Antigonish Movement.
Capitalism and socialism begin with a practical materialism that elevates things over man or, worse, reduces man to a thing.