Diary of a Capitalist: Sunday (1989)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

We keep getting these sob-stories from organisations concerned with homelessness about how many people are forced to live in late-twentieth-century Britain without a roof over their heads. Shelter, for example, estimates that there are 150,000 young people (apart from the middle-aged and old) homeless in the country (Guardian, 26.10.89). Apparently the number living in squats (illicit accommodation, with eviction a daily possibility and virtually inevitable in the long run) had “almost trebled" since two years ago. One 20-year-old said "no employer would take anyone with no fixed address. To get a fixed address you need money, and to get money you'd need a job. So there's no way out." Except, of course, prostitution. To escape grinding poverty, not a few — both males and females — finally succumb. They don't have to go looking for chances, either. "One in three young people questioned by the researchers had been approached for prostitution."

In this most degrading of sales, as in all others, there are no sellers without buyers. Prostitution depends on the economic system of buying and selling. Without some people rich enough to buy sexual excitement. and others poor enough to have to sell it. prostitution would disappear tomorrow. (Why, I wonder, isn't Mrs Whitehouse a Socialist?) These buyers aren't going to shed tears at the steady recruitment to the prostitution industry which capitalism ensures.

It's an ill wind which blows nobody any good.

Monday

One of the Rothschild family in the last century is supposed to have become interested in landscape gardening after buying a country house. He went so far as to give a lecture on the subject, beginning with the immortal words: "No garden, however small, should have less than three acres of woodland.”

After such expert advice, no one now has any excuse for having too few trees in the garden.

Tuesday

I've always made sure of having enough trees at my country place, particularly fruit trees. I love apples, eaters or cookers. If you get hold of some Bramleys, for example, you have the main ingredient of an apple pie, or tasty fritters, or a succulent apple charlotte. So when I was glancing through the paper (Observer, 29.10.89). I was sad to see it’s been a bad year for apples. 1976, it said, was poor enough, "but this year it seems even worse". A Kent farmer said: "It has been a disaster for Bramleys".

I was just reconciling myself to the idea that there would be fewer apples to go round this year, when my eye fell on the photograph accompanying the text. It showed an enormous pile of apples dumped in a field, and the caption bemoaned "a too fruitful harvest". So that's the problem! Reading the whole story again. I found the disaster was simply that there are "too many" apples. Farmers are being paid £75 per tonne by the European Community "to plough the apples back into the ground": apples are "rotting in vast piles round the Kent countryside": near Maidstone “at least £25.000 worth" of Bramleys were being "crushed into an expensive fertiliser by tractor wheels". Research shows that the average person in Britain eats precisely five Bramleys per year — one every ten weeks. At the same time people eat well-advertised junk food, often almost valueless if not positively harmful — or even go hungry. The many thousands of homeless people living rough in Britain aren't exactly over-fed. And that ignores the multitudes round the world who starve to death each year.

Wednesday

How do they see it, these apple farmers trembling lest their efforts to produce quantities of food should be crowned with success? Do they come back to the farmhouse in the evening saying "all the trees are healthy — no sign of disease. I'm afraid"? Or “masses of blossom has set, not a single gale or pest to give us a decent chance"? Or "the branches are bending to the ground with perfect fruit this year — were ruined”?

We capitalists know, of course, however much we try to conceal it from everyone else, that farmers are not aiming to produce apples, but profit. The number of apples is immaterial: if the profits are high, it's a good year; if the profits are low, it's bad.

And so the journalists who depend on us for jobs have to write whole articles about what a "disaster" it is to have a good crop of Bramleys.

Thursday

Why do people keep saying mass unemployment is a bad thing? From the capitalists' point of view, it's a good thing to keep some workers unemployed "pour encourager les autres"; just as the wartime authorities shoot unenthusiastic soldiers to encourage the others (as Voltaire pointed out). Here's a piece from the Daily Mail (26.10.89)

  Profits in industry soared over the past year to their highest level for a decade, according to a survey. Productivity has leapt 43 per cent compared with six years ago and output per worker is still rising, says a review of the top 1000 companies in Business magazine. Each employee now turns out £57,400 worth of goods or services each year — £1000 more than last year. Average profitability — the amount of industry's total sales which is profit — climbed to a record 9.9 per cent compared to 9.1 per cent last year.

Mind you, the papers shouldn't make too much of a song and dance about it. Not all the readers of the Daily Mail can be stupid: some of them must begin to wonder why. if “each employee" produces £57000 worth of goods, he or she gets paid so mch less than that.

Friday

The release of the Guildford Four (convicted of the Guildford pub bombing on no evidence whatever except for "confessions” which conflicted with and contradicted each other, which contained impossibilities. and which, it is now accepted, the police had beaten and blackmailed out of them) has been hailed as a triumph of justice. Quite right, of course. In fact, if you've ever been convicted of a crime you didn't commit, in circumstances where there is no single piece of objective evidence at all connecting you with the crime, then all you need (if the Guildford Four case is anything to go by) is your innocence proclaimed by —

• Many writers and public figures who support capitalism, but cannot stomach its worst injustices;
• Two former eminent judges (in the Guildford case, Lord Devlin and Lord Scarman);
• The two leading churchmen in the country (Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Runcie);
• Two former Home Secretaries (Roy Jenkins and Merlyn Rees);
• A campaigning TV programme at peak viewing time (produced by Yorkshire TV);
• Two full-length books (one by Robert Kee, one by Grant McKee and Ros Franey);
• Radio and TV programmes, newspapers and periodicals in Ireland;
• Numbers of articles in England (for example in the New Statesman):
• The people who actually did what you were accused of (in this case, the IRA men whose confessions gave such detail as to prove they were genuine);
• And, finally, the Crown Prosecution Service (who refused to justify the convictions in the Court of Appeal).

If you’ve got all that going for you. then after only fifteen years in jail, being beaten up occasionally by other prisoners who loyally support the Establishment — you're free!

It makes me proud of our capitalist propaganda services to think they can still argue that this is a triumph for British justice.

Saturday

Members of Christian CND want to hold their own Remembrance Service on Armistice Day. They want "to draw attention to the appalling loss of life and human suffering" in war (Eastern Evening News, 31.10.89). ‘‘We want methods and ways to be found to prevent wars happening again."

Obviously these simple people, who are still looking for ‘‘methods and ways" of preventing war, haven’t heard of Socialism. So all is well. These peace-time pacifists will be no more effective than they were on the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when you had to jump out of the way to avoid being trampled to death by the rush of Christians, pacifists, Peace Pledge Unionists and so on into the recruiting offices.

Alwyn Edgar

A lot of people should know that (1996)

“not a lot of people know that”

From the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Guardian Weekend supplement has for some time run a “Digitations” column—a compilation of facts and figures gleaned from various information bulletins and documents.

For the average reader—the Michael Caines of this world—they provide a momentary and quickly-forgotten eyebrow raiser; the kind of facts and figures you pop into the conversation at the local pub along with the refrain: “not a lot of people know that”.

To some, perhaps most, such information is trivia. To socialists, they help fuel our argument that capitalism is an insane social and economic system and one not fit for humans to thrive in. Our refrain on chancing on such facts is: “not a lot of people know why”.

What, for instance, is trivial about the fact that “UK family doctors tranquillise anxious people at the rate of at least 800,000 doses a day” (23 March) or that “in Bangkok, the homes of 98 per cent of the population are not linked to a sewer system”? (Ibid).

Here the stress of daily life for workers in an advanced industrial capitalist nation is juxtaposed with a similar economic system unable to provide the vast majority with the basics of life.

“Digitations” not only help to fuel our argument that capitalism does not operate in the interests of the world’s majority, they also help us dispel the arguments of our opponents.

We are often told the world is over-populated and that food and energy resources cannot keep pace with the demands of an increasing world population. However, “twice the world’s population could stand in the county of Devon” (4 May) and “in one season, French peasant co-ops were paid to destroy fruit and vegetables the weight of 17 Arcs de Triomph” (13 May).

Add to this the already widely known fact that landowners arc paid vast sums of money not to produce food and the problem of feeding the world’s population quickly diminishes.

As for energy? “Supplying solar powered electricity to 1,000 million people in poor developed countries would cost less than 0.3 per cent of annual military expenditure over 20 years” (30 May).

Time and time again the root cause of the problems facing humanity is the drive to make profit. Indeed, the vast majority of the problems we face are social problems, not natural ones. It is not logical to produce an abundance of fruit and vegetables under the laws of capitalism because an excess in supply invariably leads to a decline in prices and consequently profits. Similarly, solar powered electricity docs not generate the return on invested capital that coal and oil do. And the reason why “non-biodegradable plastic used in western Europe in a year would outweigh a line of Eiffel towers 32 km long” (6 April) is because biodegradable plastic is costlier to produce.

Socialists often refer to such alarming facts as these as the contradictions of capitalism. They include the fact, already mentioned, that millions of tons of food is destroyed while tens of millions starve; the fact that countless factories and machines stand idle while tens of millions are unemployed, the fact that millions of buildings stand vacant while millions sleep rough on the streets of the world’s cities. These are all social problems, not rooted in nature or sanctioned by the will of some god.

Marx once said that humankind only poses itself problems it is already capable of solving. Nothing could be more true. We live in a world in which we constantly face the threat of war, famine, disease and environmental destruction. Our society is plagued by crime, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, racism, sexism and every other type of ‘ism’. These are problems familiar to every country on earth, not just the poorest. And as in every country of the world the real cause remains the same.

Our problems stem from the way in which we organise ourselves for production—production for profit, not social use.

The means for the production of abundance, the technology and resources to comfortably feed, clothe, house and educate the world’s people already exists. They would, in fact, be enhanced were the artificial constraints to productive wealth— not profit—removed.

All that is lacking is a global desire for social change. Only when a majority of the world’s people voice disapproval of the system that impoverishes their lives and organise for world socialism can we get down to producing “digitations” to be proud of—how many new homes have been built, how many more mouths fed, how many solar energy panels installed, how few hours needed to be worked by the average individual. These will be the “digitations” that prove that socialism works.

John Bissett

DID YOU KNOW?

• More than 1 billion people live in absolute poverty, surviving on £175 per year.
• 400 million people consume less than 80% of their basic food needs.
• 13-18 million people die of hunger every year.
• Every year an area of land the size of Ireland is turned into desert.
• $1,000,000,000,000 is spent annually on weapons of war and destruction.

Preventing Abundance (1973)

From the January 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are told that hunger and malnutrition exist in the world today because there is not enough food to go around; that there are, in short, more people than can adequately be fed. Socialists emphatically repudiate this. The evidence points to the fact that man has developed the means of production to a level where it is now technically possible to abolish hunger. Technically possible, but not socially possible within the present relations of production. Capitalism is a system of commodity production, of buying and selling, where the profit motive dominates the productive activity of men and women. Market considerations take precedence over human need. The production of wealth takes place only where the owners of the means of life — the capitalist class — hope to sell their products at a profit on the world markets. The market economy bears no relation to the needs of human beings. Human priorities are sacrificed to the priorities of the profit motive.

The present state of the horticultural industry, both in this country and in Europe, is an object lesson in the restrictive nature of the market economy. For the past five or ten years the viability (ability to make a profit) of parts of the industry has been threatened by the “overproduction” of apples and pears. Increased orchard planting since the Second World War in places such as North Italy (with the help of Marshall Aid) and the Rhone valley in France (where low interest government loans were given to repatriates from Algeria) has vastly increased output. Average apple crops amount to 6m. tons and reached 7.2m. tons in 1969/70. In the following season a record pear crop of 3.2m. tons was recorded. Such large crops had not been planned for; markets were unable to absorb the produce and farmers, looking for some way to vent their frustration, dumped apples in the streets. Seventy-five per cent only of the 1967-68 apple crop was consumed in any shape or form. In other words, a quarter was left to rot — it was not worth while even using it as animal fodder or for industrial alcohol.

Aiding Industry
In Britain too investments have been made in orchards in order to stimulate production. It could hardly be otherwise. Each group of capitalists hope to maximise their profits by capturing as large a slice of the market for themselves as possible. In this they have been backed up by both the major parties of capitalism. The Horticulture Act of 1960 provided grants of up to £7.5m. spread over five years, to be paid out under a Horticultural Improvement Scheme aimed at improving efficiency among growers. The grants were increased in 1964 to £24m.; and again by the Agriculture Act 1970, this time to a maximum of £47m.

Of course these sums were not simply largesse. They were expected to benefit the capitalist class as a whole. As Christopher Soames, Minister of Agriculture at the time, pointed out, it was the intention of the government to “bring our horticultural production and marketing to a higher state of competitive efficiency”. He also hoped the industry would then be in a better position to ward off foreign competition so that the promise of possible reductions in tariffs could be used as a bargaining device in future trade negotiations.

  This is a sensible and realistic policy to adopt with regard to the industry in modern times, and is not being done because the industry is in a parlous state. It is being done to make it more competitive.

(Hansard 27 November 1963 cols. 276 & 280)

This has always been the yardstick by which governments measure the usefulness or otherwise of aiding industry. The 1968 Report of the Economic Development Council for Agriculture, Agriculture's Import Saving Role, pointed out that it might be possible for British capitalism to save itself the sum of £220m. a year by the mid-1970s through import substitution. One item suggested for saving was the annual £25m. spent on top fruit. Moreover, “there was scope for expansion of production and import substitution on a significant scale and at comparatively small cost” (Agriculture — Report etc. from the Select Committee 1968-69 H.C. 137 HMSO p.xxviii). However there appeared one small snag — only half the proposed increase in output could be expected to be absorbed by greater demand due to increasing population and income per head. The EDC report skated over the difficulty by hoping that the remainder might be exported.

Potential Abundance
This growing potential for abundance did cause some comment. In his statement to the House of Commons on 27 November 1963 Soames declared that imports at “unrealistically low prices” did arise from surpluses of varying degrees and that

  It is likely that such surpluses will reappear from time to time, so means to prevent them from undermining our market will continue to be necessary . . . We appreciate that measures must be taken to ensure that dumped produce does not undermine the market.

(Hansard 27 November 1963 cols. 277-179)

The Fruit Production Council were of the opinion that

 Apple and pear production is increasing throughout the world and particularly on the Continent of Europe, at an alarming rate.
(Horticulture — Report etc. from the Select Committee on Agriculture’s Sub-Committee 1967-68 H.C.445 HMSO p.292 (emphasis added).

When faced with this kind of "problem” capitalism can react in a number of ways. It can attempt to stimulate demand; it can try to eliminate competition; or it can cut back production and deliberately reduce productive capacity by destroying resources.

Attempts at stimulating demand have met with only limited success. It had been hoped that the Apple and Pear Development Council, established in 1966, would increase sales through an advertising campaign designed to promote British apples and pears. Its efforts were something less than a raving success. Who now remembers their slogan “Finish your meal with an English apple”? They had to report in July 1968 that “despite the efforts of both importing organisations and the UK growers to increase consumption levels there is a danger of supply outstripping demand”. Then, admitting defeat in the face of the inability to plan rationally under capitalism, they went on to say

  The Council must make it quite clear that publicity is no panacea for oversupply . . . The industry can only operate in conditions of reasonable stability. Glut conditions, uneconomic returns and violent swings in supplies are of no use to the home grower . . .  In the Council’s view, the only way to maintain reasonable conditions is by physical means such as a quota system based on quantity ... no amount of marketing skill, publicity or anything else can compete against a glutted market.

(Horticulture Report p. 184-5)

Left to Rot
In 1969 British markets shuddered under a gigantic flow of apples. Prices hit rock bottom for the producers; some were only getting 2d or 3d a pound for best quality produce. Anything other than grade one was being thrown away and farmers were leaving fruit to rot on the trees. Gerald Nabarro complained to the House of Commons that in his own constituency

   250 tons of Lord Lambourn and Laxton’s Fortune were left unpicked at Leighsinton, near Malvern . . . [and that] . . . 1,200 boxes of Melba — a very early variety — were put into store but lay unsold and are now rotting in their boxes, utterly wasted.

(Hansard 13 December 1969 col. 1665)

The gravity with which MPs treated the problem can be gauged from the fact that they found time (about 4½ hours) to have two debates on this in under two weeks. The debates concentrated on the financial implications for capitalism of the advent of this abundance. Not one of the speakers in the debates expressed any emotion remotely approaching joy that human ingenuity had resulted in plenty. Rather the opposite. Most were concerned that growers would suffer financially.

“Naturally, we must see that our growers have a viable position” said Alfred Morris, Labour MP for Wythenshaw, on 10 November (col. 139) assuring his Party’s concern for the continued prosperity of the industry. David Crouch, representing Canterbury, (somewhat nearer to the problem) after a bit of useless jingoistic nonsense to the effect that “The English apple is in my opinion second to none in the world” continued:

  I am not seeking to raise the price for the British housewife at a time of severe increase in the price of foodstuffs. It would be irresponsible to suggest that, but I have a duty to be concerned not only with the price the consumer pays but that the price should be a fair one for the British farmer, a fair and reasonable price to keep the British grower in being.
(Hansard 10 November 1969 col. 126)

But all the demands that the quota be decreased were to no avail. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, Gwyneth Dunwoody, was satisfied that “the decision reached is the best in the widest national interest” (Hansard 3 November 1969 col. 1670).

Resources Destroyed
For this capitalist “problem” the government have found a suitable capitalist “solution”. Productive resources are to be destroyed. This monstrous decision was taken after a total of less than half an hour’s debate in both Houses of Parliament.

Such action had been common policy on the Continent for a number of years and had been suggested as a way out for British growers in 1964. During the detailed debates on the Agriculture and Horticulture Bill of that year MPs representing constituencies where fruit-growing interests were strong had urged that the Improvement Grants be increased from one third to one half of the cost of grubbing up old orchards. They hoped that the increase might encourage farmers with only a few trees to dig them up. This would remove the poorer quality fruit which in glut conditions tended to spoil the market for the big growers. As it was, of the £8m. made available in 1960, only £2½m had been taken up because the scheme benefitted only the contractors who removed the trees and not the farmer who had to borrow the other two thirds of the money needed. Maxwell Hyslop, MP for Tiverton, put it this way:

  The point I was endeavouring to make was that, as productive capacity is demonstrably in excess of what is required, there is considerable merit in giving further incentive to reduce that capacity.
(Official Report Standing Committee “B” Agriculture and Horticulture Bill 30 January 1964 (emphasis added).

In his call for more “effective” action he was only reflecting the view of Liberal MP for Montgomery, Emlyn Hooson, who had stated that “obsolete” orchards should have been grubbed out years ago.

  I ask the Minister, why not a 100 per cent grant for grubbing out orchards. This would be of great benefit to the country.

(Hansard 12 December 1963 col. 632)

What distinguishes these grants from the Farm Capital Grant (Variation) Scheme of last year is that they did not preclude replanting. As such they might have something to recommend them in that a greater output may be achieved from heavier cropping varieties developed since the orchard was planted, often up to fifty years ago. The 1971 Scheme however specifically provides that if the grant is paid the grower must undertake not to replant his orchard for at least five years. When asked to elaborate on the precise meaning of the words “restricting planting” in this latest Order, Earl Ferrers explained:

  The aim is to encourage something of a crash programme of grubbing. It is no part of the purpose of these schemes for orchards which are grubbed up with their assistance to be replanted with new apple and pear trees.

(Lords Hansard 3 August 1971 col. 1088)

In addition the grant was to be at the full rate of standard grubbing costs. Again it was seen to be in the interests of capitalism as a whole that these grants should be made as the orchards, said Junior Minister Anthony Stodart,

  are a source of quite considerable weakness to the rest of the industry. We cannot afford a weakness of this kind.

(Hansard 30 July 1971 col. 1024) (emphasis added)

Profit the Aim

These grants, it is hoped, will steady the market enough to encourage further investment in the industry and thus make it more profitable. For that is really the whole object of the exercise. The primary function of farmers is not the growing of food that will satisfy a basic human need; their main aim in business is the accumulation of profit. In a memorandum to the House of Commons Select Committee’s Sub-committee on Horticulture, the National Farmers’ Union reminded them that:

  When all is said and done, what counts is whether at the end of the day the producer has sufficient profit to reward his employees and himself . . . and to provide as good a return on the capital he has invested as he would have received had it been invested elsewhere. Generally speaking a new attitude requires to be engendered on horticultural prices which would acknowledge that the grower is entitled to a fair return.

(Horticulture Report p.161)

In hot pursuit of this “fair return” growers had, with the aid of government grants amounting to £140,000, cleared 10,000 acres (about ten per cent) of British orchards. It then became clear that this was not enough; the clearance of another 5,000 acres would be necessary. But even this did not satisfy the present Minister of Agriculture, James Prior, who is reported to have said “I want to see an expanded grubbing-up programme for apples whether we are in the Common Market or outside . . . I must tell you outright to look very carefully at your investment” (The Times 8 January 1971). This will entail the grubbing-up of old but pretty orchards, and their replacement by vast plantations of uniform varieties of fruit. Already one contractor alone has bulldozed over 700 acres in Kent, and this year another 875 farmers have taken up grants worth £300,000 to destroy 6,150 acres of apples and pears. Before the grant scheme runs out in March of next year Prior hopes to have persuaded growers to clear a further 9,000 acres.

How successful all this will be in restoring scarcity to its dominant place in the capitalist way of life remains doubtful. It has been reliably reported (Sunday Times 8 July 1971) that mini-trees have been planted at a density of 50,000 to the acre compared to the normal 120 to the acre. These would give an output, not of the normal 8 tons to the acre, but a massive 100 tons of apples per acre every two years. It may not be long before we see the whole sad spectacle repeating itself. Capitalism cannot bring together the plenty and the poor so that the former eliminates the latter.

Gwynn Thomas

Too much of a good thing (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The current problems in the apple market are highlighted in this report from The Guardian (25 September):

  Fruit growers throughout Southern England are dumping thousands of tons of apples or leaving them to rot on the trees because of a disastrous slump in prices.
  Piles of rotting apples can be seen from Worcestershire and Cambridgeshire to Kent.
  The slump began when Australian and New Zealand apples, held up by the dock strike, came on the market much later than usual, just as the English season began, said Mr. Robert Miller, chairman of the National Farmers’ Union fruit committee.
  “For some reason the market has just not picked up since. We have had a big crop of fruit of excellent quality, but we can’t sell it.”
  “Every English apple and pear sold at the moment is being sold at a loss.” 

Perhaps few people are going to be disturbed by the thought of dumped apples. But the same thing happens to other food, more essential to human health, and to other forms of wealth, if the market is in the same depressed condition. This is capitalism at work — the market is an essential part of it, but it is something capitalism cannot control.

A Food Shortage in War and Peace (1946)

From the April 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poverty and plenty are the most vivid contrasts of capitalism. A day after the Manchester Guardian Weekly printed a report from Budapest which stated that owing to famine: “Of 3,000 babies born in November only 800 survived,” an article in the Economist finished with this sentence: “The agricultural crisis is still with us; but it will be our old acquaintance, the crisis of plenty—for those members of the human race who survive the present crisis of famine ” (16/2/46). They did not develop this idea—they did not ask: Why the crisis of plenty? Earlier they stated that there had never been sufficient to fill all "human bellies”; also effective demand was lacking for the "unsaleable surplus.” Why was this demand lacking? This article stopped where it could well have started.

From every part of the world comes news of a terrible food shortage. It is estimated that millions will die owing to the deficiency amounting to several millions of tons in staple foods. Politicians are not short of reasons; the monsoon has failed and long, repeated droughts have ruined the grain harvests in the Southern Hemisphere. But it is not merely a natural calamity. Given a social order where the only purpose of production was use, sufficient would be produced and stored in good years to spread over the very rare bad years. What we have had is this. For six years the representatives of capitalism urged their armies to “bomb, burn and destroy.” They, engaged in the cruel process of reducing each other to famine. To preserve their wealth and privilege our masters turned Europe into a desert of destroyed towns and ruined farms. At their victory banquets they exhort us to tighten our belts. At the same time they call on us to produce more food to avoid the disaster of mass starvation.

But will the production of an abundance of food free workers from a starvation diet? or, is a world food shortage the sole cause of hunger? Not at all. In countries such as Great Britain and America, where workers were alleged to enjoy a “high standard” of living and where there was an abundance of food before the war, millions of workers suffered from semi-starvation. The “unsaleable surplus” was there but the demand was lacking as workers, unemployed or earning low wages, were unable to buy the food necessary to health. Hunger existed, not because of a natural shortage, but because the food was produced for sale. As wheat was produced primarily for the market, good harvests were regarded as natural disasters because they threatened glut. In May, 1937, the Daily Herald reported on the possible wheat crop: “The Imperial Economic Committee fears over-production . . . the Committee visualises the “danger” of a series of good harvests ” (12/5/37). By way of a joke, the failure of 1932 was alleged to be due not to the monsoon, but the Boll Weevil; the pest that should have but failed to destroy cotton crops.

Capitalism’s politicians meet the food crisis by advocating the simple remedy—produce more. Mr. R. Law, minister in the late Coalition Government, stated in a broadcast talk, “I wonder how many people realise that there was a world food shortage before the war. Even in the U.S.A. . . . there were millions of people who were not eating the food to keep them reasonably healthy . .  . And it was not only a question of bad distribution. It was not just our old friend, 'Poverty in the midst of plenty.’ As a matter of fact the food simply was not there.” (Quoted in Forward, 15/12/45.) He wants to produce 20 per cent more grain and 100 per cent more meat, milk and fruit. Did Mr. Law and his colleagues know that there was insufficient food before the war? If so, why did they not set about producing more? Did they make any effort to close me gap between supply and needs? If there was a shortage, why restrict production? Why destroy that which had already been produced? In his book, "But Who Has Won,” Mr. J. Scanlon gives the following quotation from “Health and Nutrition in India,” by Professor N. Gangube: "Owing to the restriction put in the export of meat by the Ottawa agreement in 1932, the Government of Chile considered it expedient to kill half a million sheep for the manufacture of tallow on condition that the carcasses should be burned. In Denmark the Government created a special destruction fund to kill and burn about 5,000 cattle per week. . . . In America the farmers of Kansas and Nebraska were subsidised for burning their grain . . . For the sake of 'National Prosperity’ the Federal Government ordered the slaughter of some 5,000,000 pigs and some 200,000 prospective mother sows. Brazil burned its coffee crop . . .” (Page 197.) To this can be added the stories of fish sold as manure, oranges dumped in the sea and wheat used as engine fuel. The destruction of wealth for victory in war simply followed the destruction of wealth for profit in peace.

The remedy is not simply that of producing in abundance. Mr. Law has seen only part of the truth. It is true that there never has been sufficient for all, but Law has overlooked this: that no effort has been made to produce this abundance as those who own the means of producing wealth, and decide what will be produced, require not abundance but profit. They produce at a profitable level—a level far below the needs of all mankind, but a level that on average supplies the market to capacity. The cry of overproduction merely meant that too much had been produced for that market; it had no relation to the needs of the population. While Mr. Law’s colleagues bleated "too much wealth” and advocated severe wage-cuts as the remedy to the crisis, millions of workers starved. They starved while the wealth that they had helped to produce was destroyed. We have answered the questions for Mr. Law. The capitalists did not attempt to close the gap, they restricted production and destroyed wealth and for one purpose—to preserve profit.

Mr. Law scoffs at "Poverty in the midst of plenty,” but has himself completely missed the point. The act of producing more, unless accompanied by a social change, will be nullified by the workings of the economic laws of capitalism. Plenty would once more, as the Economist states, lead to crisis. The reason is that, owing to capitalist ownership, all wealth produced belongs to them while the working class have only a very limited purchasing power; a purchasing power far below the value of the goods they produce. "Unsaleable surpluses” accumulate and starvation exists while food rote in warehouses and is destroyed. The famine of peace will follow the famine of war. In capitalism, whether we have war or peace, only poverty and hunger comes to those who toil while riches and repletion come to those who own. The solution lies in the hands of the working-class. It must make the fundamental social change from private to common ownership of the means of life.

Lew Jones

Comic Relief (1988)

From the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remember February 5th? — the momentous day we all donned our red noses, bow ties and other silly attire, for comic relief. Yet another day of activity to raise yet more funds for charities and worthwhile causes. Millions of people bought red noses; some walked backwards on pub crawls, others ate worms or threw jelly; all supposedly to alleviate suffering here and around the globe.

Working as I do from five in the morning at a newsagents, I had it all day. First half-a-dozen sleepy eyed, red nosed newsboys/ girls — then school kids in an assortment of madcap outfits, and later on even a horse paid a visit asking for donations. These brainwashed children from seven to seventy, convinced that this was the way to end famine and other needs, kept asking me “where is your red nose?” Charity, I replied, is futile as the problems are always recurring. I was told not to be a bore and asked what I would do about these problems.

Well, while Bob Geldof helped raise some one million pounds for famine relief over two years, the Common Market spends more than two million pounds every week on its unwanted food mountains. In Britain’s 248 grain stores there is enough wheat and barley to feed six million people for three years. There are 47,000 tons of beef, 23,000 tons of skimmed milk powder and 248,000 tons of butter, much of which is more than two years old and useless. According to This Week (TV 4 February) and other sources, it is the civil war in Ethiopia which prevents relief agency supplies from reaching areas stricken again by drought. Agonisingly the agencies are ready but they cannot transport the food to where an estimated five million people are at risk of starvation.

On top of this is the fact that over one million pounds is spent every minute on the most destructive, grotesque weapons ever created. “Well, that’s fair enough” the clowns reply, “so what do you propose?” What about a society where all the resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled — where factories, farms, offices, mines and media belong to the whole community regardless of race or sex? A world in which people have free access to all goods and services, giving according to their ability and taking according to their self-defined needs?

At the nearby library red nosed readers were served by red nosed librarians as cars passed by outside with red balloons on their bonnets. The school children dressed as penguins and peasants, threw jelly and streamers, the clowns joined the horse on the backwards walk to the pub. And they call socialists crazy.

Brian.

Do You Like Coffee? (1932)

From the September 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following interesting sidelight on capitalism is a Reuter message from New York, published in the Daily Telegraph (5th July, 1932): —

  More than 1,000,000,000 lbs. of coffee, worth over £10,000,000, have been destroyed in Brazil by the National Coffee Council in its efforts to stabilise the price of coffee. According to the New York Sugar and Coffee Exchange, the amount destroyed before June 18 was 7,786,000 bags of 132 lbs. each, or a total of 1,027,752,000 lbs.
  The original plan of the Council contemplated a total destruction of 18,000,000 bags.

A Starvation Society (1976)

From the Spring 1976 issue of the Western Socialist

 This is one of a series of articles that appeared in the Lance, published by the Student Media, University of Windsor in Windsor, Ont., Canada.

World hunger — over-population — poverty. That's what we hear now. Each year there are sixty million deaths in the world, thirty to forty million have to be attributed to malnutrition. In other words, 80,000 to 110,000 die from malnutrition every day. It's no accident. The problem could be solved.

It's hard to believe, but people are actually starving in Canada and the United States. Food prices go up. The politicians tell us there is a food shortage. Don't believe them.

Some Statistics
Take Canada for example. In 1972 the federal government used $2.25 million to pay farmers to slaughter more than a million laying hens — the objective? — to make eggs scarce and force prices up. In 1969 the government, using the Lower Inventory for Tomorrow program (LIFT), paid farmers not to grow wheat and discouraged them from switching to other crops. As a result, the Dept, of Agriculture claimed that the program cut wheat acreage in 1970-71 by 45 per cent. Seven million acres of land, land which could have produced food, were deliberately left fallow.

This isn't uncommon. The 1969 Task Force on Agriculture recommended a ten year cut back in wheat production. Just recently the Canadian Marketing Agency confirmed that 28 million eggs were destroyed due to improper storage.

And this isn't only happening in Canada, but in the United States and Europe. In 1972, the government of England planned the slaughter of up to 2 million laying hens in order to solve the surplus of eggs on the market. A “surplus” of eggs? My, my, how interesting. Cattle were slaughtered because of an acute shortage of fodder. Why the shortage? — well, the government did all it could to encourage beef production, but they made the stupid blunder of forgetting to encourage a corresponding production of hay. Such are the fine workings of the system.


United Nations sources state that 400 million people are not getting enough food to meet minimum nutritional needs and 75 million are faced with the prospect of death by starvation. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, stated that in the next few months of this year millions will die from starvation.

The U.S.. with a population of 210 million — the richest country in the world — has at least 40 million living in poverty. How many are starving?

But what do the rich care? One typical example is Eleanor Ritchey, a Quaker State Oil Corp. heiress who left her entire fortune of $4.5 million to her pets — 150 stray and show dogs. My God! Others who can’t afford nutritional meals are forced to feed dog food to their children.

It is contended that two-thirds of the world is starving. If this were true then the world’s population would decrease. Actually, however, starvation really means malnutrition from protein deficiency. And it can be solved.

Food For Profit Only 

Present world production of food could be doubled by applying techniques of extracting protein and sugar from the three-quarters of the plant which is presently thrown away. Scientists estimate that if the sea’s resources were tapped then one acre of its surface could produce twice as much protein-rich food as an acre of pasture.

Then why isn’t it done? — because it isn’t profitable, the cost is too great. That is the root of the problem. The capitalist wants a profit and he will not produce that which costs him money. The only value he sees worth creating is in goods he can sell for his sacred profit — damn anything else — let the world starve — it’s good for business.

Capitalist progress is perverted. If a few people die they can easily be replaced. Such progress. Take the war in Vietnam. Let’s face it. It was good business to kill 56,000 Americans and three and one-quarter-million Vietnamese. American capitalists received millions for the production of napalm. Tons of it was dropped upon thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of innocents. You see, it had this effect of melting human flesh and misshaping it into inhuman form. Did you ever see the faces of those mutilated children. Did you ever see the smiles on the faces of the capitalists who produced these bombs because “business was never better”?

You can measure how far capitalists who produced these bombs because “business was never better”?

By 1972, approximately 90,000 tons of U.S. chemical warfare agents were used in Vietnam. Crop cultivation sufficient to feed 2 million people for a year was destroyed.

You can measure how far capitalist society has progressed by counting the increasing number of monsters and idiots born because of radioactive fall out, nerve gas, mercury poisoning and nuclear wastes.

Capitalism is Insane

Capitalism is an iron rat. The system is insane. It cannot work efficiently. Damn it — it can't work at all!

Colonialism and imperialism, bred by capitalism, rapes the Third World of resources leaving it underdeveloped. In return these countries are given the benefits of our society — like a brand new Howard Johnson’s or a Burger King to brighten up the place.

We are told that the earth has insufficient land area to service its growing population. The facts are that the present land area of the world could adequately support 12 to 16 billion people. The whole population of the United Kingdom could be rehoused in one county, Devon, with a density of 10 houses per acre and there would still be enough land to spare.

As for depletion of vital minerals from our soil. This is based on the simple model of soil and population, totally disregarding the third factor — human ability to use science and technology to attain certain ends.

Too Many People?

Population control? Our present neo-Malthusians see this as an answer. They take our present social system as being unalterable. To them the only thing that can be changed to solve the problems of world starvation is human sexual behaviour. The argument of these “intellectuals” is that “we can bring the problem under control once we stop the people of the poor nations from breeding like rabbits.” Such logic. They try to give a biological solution to a social problem. The facts are that wherever industry and education have reached high levels, population growth declines.

But get a load of some of the “solutions” to the problem. Richard Bowers, a founder of the Zero Population Growth movement, suggests mass suicide to cut the surplus population. Others suggest that the weak be allowed to die. To these social-Darwinists it is the strong who will survive. Hell — why not mass extermination then. Sure, why not? If the fascists could exterminate six million Jews in the death camps then why not do it again — only this time we won’t discriminate.

Yes, millions will go on starving and will die in the streets and this will keep on as long as this moronic system goes on. As long as the capitalist can worship his god — Mammon — then they won’t listen to the cries of the starving. His god is profit — now the “common whore of mankind”.

Expressions of pity by our smiling politicians and “leaders” for the hungry is bullshit. The corpses will keep piling up and will lay at our very doorstep. It just makes me sick to think we allow it to happen.

Len Wallace

How to feed the hungry (1972)

From the April 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

QUEENSLAND Egg Marketing Board has suggested the Queensland poultry farmers dump more than 79,000,000 eggs into the sea because there was no profitable market for their huge surplus.

(Sunday Post, 17 February, 1972)

The Review Column: Petrol Price War (1967)

The Review Column from the April 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Petrol Price War
Esso started the latest battle in the petrol price war because they were afraid of the competition they were meeting from the cut-price companies like Jet, Curfew and Heron.

At the moment these firms have about ten per cent of the British market; they are growing fast and one forecast sees them holding almost thirty per cent by 1970.

It was clearly time for quick action; Esso took it after a detailed review of the market Their decision was a close secret; a BP Shell executive confessed that the first his firm heard of it was when they read their newspapers.

The all round price reduction which has followed was inevitable. Esso's big rivals could not be left out and the cut price firms were bound to try to keep their advantage

It was also inevitable that this should be greeted as an example of the benefits of competition, as if the results of a commercial war are always lower prices and as if these give any permanent advantages to the working class.

In fact the petrol firms are the last examples which supporters of capitalism should give as proof of the benefits of competition

In terms of human effort and social welfare, is it efficient to have two stations opposite each other, both selling basically the same commodity but vying with each other in the colour and shape of their pumps, in the glamour of their forecourt attendants, in the colour and number of the stamps they give away, and in the sheer stupidity of their sales gimmicks?

What advantage did anyone, apart from Esso shareholders. get from the Tiger In Your Tank campaign? Does society progress a little each time a Regent station adorns a rear windscreen with those plastic bullet-holes?

In many ways, the oil industry shows how ingenious man can be. It also shows how capitalism restricts him, and how it wastes so much of what he achieves.


Wasted Wealth
Everyone knows what they did to the coffee in Brazil; someone even wrote a funny song about it.

We are all accustomed by now to hearing about all sorts of food being destroyed because it could not fetch what is called an “economic" price on the market.

In pursuit of the all-important economic price they have burnt coffee. They have ploughed in vegetables, tipped milk down pit shafts, stored wheat in unemployed ships.

This sort of waste is not confined to foodstuffs. Industry will often stockpile its products, or simply stop making them, if the market is not right.

The contortions which capitalism goes through to satisfy its economic priorities can seem amusing, especially when the pens of reporters or song writers get busy on them.

Last February, for example, the Italian police started burning 57 million postage stamps, some of them rare and valuable. Keen philatelists might beat their foreheads in frustration at this news, so engagingly reported as another example of Italian whimsy.

But the reason for the stamps being burnt was that the Italian government was afraid that to release them would have devastated the world philatelic market.

A more complicated example is the case of the Drinks Down the Sink. British European Airways have issued a stern reminder to their cabin staff that all partly finished bottles of drink served on their aircraft must be poured away at the end of each trip.

Not that there is anything wrong with the stuff. It is just that to bring back part-bottles breaks Customs regulations, which have been painstakingly built up over the years to stop something so sensible as the free movement of the world’s wealth.

Some day the working class will stop laughing at capitalism’s contortions and realise at whose expense the joke is being made.

Labour Pains

It is by no means impossible that Harold Wilson’s famous castigation of his critics in the Labour Party as “dogs” was another piece of Wilsonian tactics.

The phrase itself, carefully leaked, with all the accompanying comments about licenses, was bound to be seized on by news-thirsty journalists and to be worked to death in all its canine variations.

This gave Wilson the headlines again, for day after day as the M.P.s under his whip answered back in the same doggy simile.

But this is no time for clever speeches and articles. The Labour Party is facing another of its many crises and. as the recent by-elections have shown, its support is falling away. Said The Guardian of March 6:

  The high promise on which it was elected in 1964 and re-elected in 1966 is not being fulfilled.

This may cause some disappointment in the Labour Party, especially in its so-called Left Wing, and among less committed circles such as The Guardian, which have supported Labour for some years, in fact since the Macmillan government started going downhill.

Yet surprise is the last thing anyone should feel. We have had plenty of experience of Labour government and we should know by now that each time its “high promise” is unfulfilled. The only surprise is that anyone, anywhere, still believes in it.

It was this knowledge, and not prophetic insight, which caused the Socialist Standard of November 1964 to greet the new Labour government with these words: 

  They say that they intend to give “strong” government and to carry out their full programme. They are confident now. Let them remember this when the time comes for apologies and excuses.

That time is now. This is not the first occasion Labour Party supporters have writhed in frustration. Now let them remember.

Aid for the Starving Biafrans (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "The Ivory Coast is systematically destroying 100,000 tons of 1967-68 season coffee, according to official sources. This is to conform with the International Coffee Agreement and to ease financing of stocks that have become considerable, the sources say". —The Times, 30 November 1968.

More Food Destroyed (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Farmers in East Anglia are in a fix because they have grown “too many” beans. The climate there allows them to grow French dwarf beans which they sell to processing firms for freezing. Ten years ago production was limited because the beans had to be picked by hand. Now there are machines to do this. These, coupled with this year’s good summer, have brought the disaster of a bumper crop—and a bumper crop under capitalism is a disaster more often than not. The beans cannot be sold at profitable prices and so are being ploughed into the ground.

The Financial Times (29 August), which reported this example of the destruction of food to preserve profits, says the farmers are “sore at having to waste so much good food”.

No doubt they are. We hope this episode will lead them, and others, to reflect on the absurdity of the capitalist profit system which demands that food be destroyed despite half the world being hungry.

Ploughing-in food is just one of the more dramatic ways in which the fetter capitalist ownership places on production is shown up. The world could produce enough food to feed everybody, but capitalism will not allow this because it would not be profitable.

An Offence to Destroy Food—But only in War-Time (1940)

Editorial from the September 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reviving a practice adopted during the last war, the Government has issued an order under which it is an offence to waste food. Heavy penalties, up to two years' imprisonment and a £500 fine, may be imposed on persons who wilfully or negligently damage or throw away anything “used by man for food or drink other than water," water being already covered by bye-laws. The order also makes it an offence if anyone having control or custody of food fails to take reasonable precautions for its preservation, or if anyone procures a larger quantity than is reasonably required for his purposes, and part becomes unfit for use.

It is recalled that during the last war a woman was fined £20 for giving meat to a St. Bernard dog, while another who fed 14 dogs on bread and milk was fined £5.

This seems all very reasonable. What could be more natural than that it should be illegal to destroy or waste food when there are human beings in need of it. But observe. The order to this effect introduced in the last war ceased when the war ended. No authorities stepped in to fine and imprison the individuals and companies responsible for destroying wheat and coffee, throwing fish back into the sea, feeding milk to pigs, and so on. Indeed, in some countries the destruction of foodstuffs to keep up prices was organised with the active support of State authorities themselves.

There is, indeed, something very unnatural about the social system that permitted such things.

Cry Over Spilt Milk (1954)

From the July 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “Villagers blinked in surprise when a 3.000-gallon milk tanker drew up at their disused coal mine. They wondered why. But they were not left wondering long—for the milk was poured to the bottom of the pit.”
   “The tanker came again and again and the people of Tunley. near Bath, found that their pit had been turned into a 60,000-gallon ‘milk bottle' ”—Daily Herald, (2.6.54.)

The milk was skimmed and had been left over from butter-making. “Transport and other difficulties” allegedly prevented the farmers having it for animal fattening, yet the tankers could make 20-mile trips just to dump it. The Milk Marketing Board offered the explanation that when sold at 3½d. or 4d. a pint was hardly economical. Milk, of course, is today produced to sell, and if it can’t be sold then the cows are just wasting their time.

Ironically enough, on the same day the Manchester Guardian carried a report that a record number of one million cows were artificially inseminated in the year ended last March. These dumb animals had better realise that, along with their human counterparts, they are in grave danger of working themselves out of a job. Not only that—their work seems to have been deprived of pleasure, too.

STAN.