"The poor are the only consistent altruists; they sell all they have and give it to the rich"
About this Quote
A neat reversal of the Gospel injunction to sell all you have and give to the poor, the line turns a moral ideal into social critique. Calling the poor the only consistent altruists is bitter irony: their time, labor, possessions, and even health are continually sold in order to live, and the proceeds are funneled upward to landlords, employers, creditors, and the owners of shops and utilities. The language mimics the pieties of charity to expose an economy where generosity is not freely chosen but extracted by necessity.
Holbrook Jackson, a sharp-tongued early 20th-century British critic associated with The New Age and Fabian debates, wrote amid the stark inequalities of industrial capitalism. His aphorism lands near Marx’s analysis of surplus value without the jargon: workers sell their labor below the value it creates, and the difference accumulates as profit. It also anticipates the modern idea of trickle-up economics, where profit, rent, interest, fees, and prices collect at the top while the bottom bears the most regressive costs.
The phrase they sell all they have stretches beyond wages to the pawnshop logic of poverty: selling goods to pay rent, trading future earnings for payday loans, sacrificing education, rest, and longevity to cover bills. Even consumption becomes a transfer mechanism, since most spending flows to firms owned by the affluent. Meanwhile, society often celebrates the sporadic philanthropy of the rich while overlooking the involuntary, everyday subsidy the poor provide just to keep the system running.
There is no sentimental praise here. Altruism is a blade of sarcasm, pointing at a moral inversion: those with the least shoulder the greatest burden of maintaining the wealth of others. The line presses a hard question of justice, not charity. If the poor already give so much, what would it mean to design institutions where their giving is not coerced and where the returns of their labor and life are allowed, for once, to remain their own?
Holbrook Jackson, a sharp-tongued early 20th-century British critic associated with The New Age and Fabian debates, wrote amid the stark inequalities of industrial capitalism. His aphorism lands near Marx’s analysis of surplus value without the jargon: workers sell their labor below the value it creates, and the difference accumulates as profit. It also anticipates the modern idea of trickle-up economics, where profit, rent, interest, fees, and prices collect at the top while the bottom bears the most regressive costs.
The phrase they sell all they have stretches beyond wages to the pawnshop logic of poverty: selling goods to pay rent, trading future earnings for payday loans, sacrificing education, rest, and longevity to cover bills. Even consumption becomes a transfer mechanism, since most spending flows to firms owned by the affluent. Meanwhile, society often celebrates the sporadic philanthropy of the rich while overlooking the involuntary, everyday subsidy the poor provide just to keep the system running.
There is no sentimental praise here. Altruism is a blade of sarcasm, pointing at a moral inversion: those with the least shoulder the greatest burden of maintaining the wealth of others. The line presses a hard question of justice, not charity. If the poor already give so much, what would it mean to design institutions where their giving is not coerced and where the returns of their labor and life are allowed, for once, to remain their own?
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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