What the market does to our food

From the Winter 1987-88 issue of the World Socialist 

British agriculture is notable for being the most mechanised in the world. There are more tractors than farm-workers. A smaller proportion of the working population — about 1 per cent as opposed to 4.5 per cent in the United States — works on the land and is responsible for two thirds of all our food and drink. Yields are among the highest in the world; wheat at more than five tons to the acre, for example. This compares with North America where one ton is the norm, curiously enough not much more than the average yield in Medieval England. But this arises from the extensive agriculture of Canada and the US with their limitless plains. Europeans have to squeeze more out of their plots.

Historically this was effected by good husbandry; manuring, marling, liming. Now it is achieved by spreading ever increasing amounts of chemical fertiliser on the fields. Equally, increasing amounts are washed off into the watercourses creating new problems, causing the Health Ministry to warn mothers in East Anglia, for example, not to make up their babies' feed with tap water on account of the sodium nitrate in it.

In the middle 1980's Britain again became, after a gap of two centuries, a net exporter of grain. British agriculture had, during those two hundred years, been the plaything of governments. The split in the ruling oligarchy between the landed interests and the new industrial magnates, between the old Tory interest (which incorporated the State Church) and the new Whigs, had made agriculture a political football. The most outstanding expressions of this struggle were those Corn Laws which were passed from 1815 onwards and repealed after a bitter struggle in 1846.

Driven off the land

The Tories favoured protection: high tariffs on imported corn, so guaranteeing them as landowners a high price. The Whigs wanted free trade in corn so that bread and beer for their workers were cheap and would result in cheaper labour.

After the repeal of the Corn Laws, imported grain from North America, but also from Russia, Argentina and Australia kept British agriculture in an almost permanent state of depression.

It is interesting to examine the nature of this competition that British farmers faced from overseas:

The very cheapness of our public lands, and the facility of purchase and transfer, tended to a system of bad farming, or strip and waste of the soil, by encouraging short occupancy and a speedy search for new homes, entailing upon the first and older settlements a rapid deterioration of the soil, which would not be likely to be arrested except by more thorough and scientific knowledge of agriculture and by a higher education of those who were dedicated to its pursuit. (Justin Smith Morell, quoted by Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America, p. 145)

So much for the doctrine of Comparative Advantage of David Ricardo in which each nation is supposed to concentrate on what it does best. The Americans, once the Red Indians were got out of the way, took over a continent stuffed with good things: thousands of square miles of timber, some of it many centuries in the growing; oil in the South West so abundant that a pipe had only to be banged into the ground and oil would gush out; mountain ranges of high grade iron ore in Minnesota; and the loess soil of the great plains, wind blown alluvium which had built up over geological time to the equivalent of a topsoil thirty and forty feet deep in places.

Most of these comparative advantages have lost some of their edge. The soil was the first to go. From the first settlers on, the technique of farming was little different from the crudest slash-and-burn agriculture of primitive peoples. The land was "pumped" as the French say. It was cultivated until exhaustion set in, often no more than four harvests, and cultivators moved on to a fresh patch. It was cheaper to do this than replace the nutrition in the soil as European farmers had been obliged to do for thousands of years. It followed the doctrine of Comparative Advantage as enjoined by the new Market-based economics with highly satisfactory results — in the short term. European — particularly British — agriculture could not compete and the result was the economic destruction of small and medium farmers. The continuing Enclosure Acts scooped up the small farms into the properties of the big landowners and social disaster was added to agricultural chaos.

In our own time the process is being extended to Third World, in this case Brazil:

The big trouble is a steady flow of migrants from the countryside. Squeezed off the land by the rapid advance of mechanised crop farming and by the spread of huge ranches raising beef cattle, millions of families swarm into the cities. Under pressure to survive, they turn to crime and so provide more than their share of the jail population.

The civilian Government that took over in Brazil last year, after 21 years of military rule, is trying to clinch a programme whereby millions of acres of land still sloppily farmed by big landlords are to be split up into family smallholdings. That way, the human tide flowing into the cities would be reduced to a trickle, even reversed, Ministers hope.

But many landlords are digging in their heels against the scheme, some using hired gunmen to keep wandering landless families from settling on estates where they try to build huts, plough and plant.

Landless squatters are being murdered by paid triggermen at the rate of about four a week across Brazil. But you don't see many of the gunmen, or their bosses, in jail.

(Observer, 11 May 1986)

Needless to say the majority of these huge ranches are owned by foreign-based multinationals and the bulk of the meat is intended for junk-food in the West — hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages. Agronomists have predicted ecological catastrophe in the cutting down of tropical rain-forest and replacing it with grazing in the fragile soil of the area.

In the United States this catastrophe has already been visited upon huge areas. The soil was deprived of the organic material which bound it together and the wind and weather just blew it or washed it away again. The dust bowls and dust storms of the United States are part of world history and the process is continuing. Chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides are being rushed up into the battle to get food out of the land, yet every time the solution seems short-lived, the cure worse than the disease.

The chorus of warning from biologists and agronomists fills the reading lists and the newspapers. Massed against them is the power of the multinational agrochemical industry and the stubbornness of farmers who are struggling to avoid foreclosure by the banks. Thousands of farmers in the Mid-West have been turned out by the bailiffs in the present depression, and the big interests have taken over.

The Average British Diet

There was a major crisis in British fanning in the late 1870's and 1880's which was only interrupted by World War I when foreign food imports were almost cut off by German U-boat attacks. The stimulus to cultivation and stock rearing did not last much longer than the end of the war, however. By the middle 1930's there was less land under the plough in England than there had been in the Domesday Book, nearly nine hundred years before, when the population was one-thirtieth of the size!

Those who do not learn from the lesson of the past are doomed to repeat its errors, says George Santayana, and the British government again found itself in World War II with the prospect of starvation for the people. All talk of market forces was forgotten. Backyards, tennis courts, lawns, public parks and golf courses were dug-up and planted. A medieval cottage economy took over great areas of the country with people keeping chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigs in back gardens and in London, even on their roofs.

The tendency to import Britain's food and drink requirements rather than rely on home-produced goods had begun early. Large quantities of wine were imported in the Middle Ages but it was not a staple of diet, despite the quantities involved, three million gallons annually in the fifteenth century, one for every man, women and child in the country.

From the eighteenth century on, however, exotics like cane sugar, tea, and coffee were imported to join potatoes as new and important items of diet, to the chagrin of commentators like Cobbett. He felt that tea and potatoes were no substitute for the bread and ale of old England.

The deleterious effects of sugar in the diet were far greater, especially when cane sugar from the West Indies met competition from the new home grown beet sugar. The greatly reduced cost, together with advertising and the confectionary industry have produced the highest sugar consumption and the worst teeth in the world. The dental profession's efforts to do something about it are stultified by the fact that the government is beholden to the power of pressure groups like the sugar and confectionery interests who dominate all food committees and ultimately Parliament itself. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and the sugar interest pays a lot to politicians, particularly Conservative politicians.

The move to the steel-roller milling of flour in the latter half of the nineteenth century reduced still further the quality of the average British diet. The new mills could not deal with the germ and the bran of the wheat as the old stone mills had done and these elements were disposed of as animal feed or sold to the public as cures for the diseases created by the deficient flour.

The resistance which might have been offered to the continuing debasement of British diet by a peasant population was missing; the peasantry had finally been got rid of by the General Enclosure of 1845. The "allotments" offered as a sop might have enabled a worker to survive on a lower wage; they would not enable him to thumb his nose at an insufficiently generous wage offered by a prospective employer. As Professor Thorold Rogers wrote of earlier Enclosures: "Two acts of government had effectually delivered the English labourers into the hands of their employers and left them helpless. These were Henry's crime of base money and the confiscation of glebe lands. "(History of Agriculture and Prices in England, Volume V)

The period between World Wars I and II must be reckoned among the worst years for British diet. True, there was not the picturesque squalor of Victorian England nor the comedy of the Union-Jack-waving freaks who offered themselves for service in the Boer War, two thirds of whom were rejected as unfit even for the army. The scraps and leavings with which Dickens' characters fed themselves had been replaced by a diet of weak tea, turnip jam, and a bread which might have been made from plaster of Paris for all the nutritive value it contained. The consequence was a race of dwarfs with blackened teeth and rickets. When the Second World War broke out a vast industry was called into being to fit up these degenerates with sets of false teeth and spectacles and to sew up their piles and hernias. As Mayhew, Engels and the Hammonds had exposed the terrible diets of the nineteenth century, so another group of reformers, Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour, Sir Jack Drummond, were calling attention to the condition of British agriculture and the terrible diets of British citizens in the twentieth century.

The Second World War brought death to 40 million Europeans and privation to the survivors, but to the British working class the war-time rationing of foodstuffs meant, paradoxically, an improvement in diet, so bad had standards been before. Official statistics reported increased height and body weight of children and dental decay was reducing. This was despite a generous ration of confectionery which at the end of the war stood at seven ounces per person per week. The conclusion this suggests is that the body can deal with a certain amount of sugar and other rubbish provided general levels of nutrition are kept up — which had not been the case pre-war.

The end of sweet-rationing was strongly opposed by the trade — another paradox. But they knew what we have always argued: that free access to a good or service, or to all goods and services, does not mean increased consumption, but usually the opposite. The illusion or reality of limited supply creates a false demand. At all events, sweet rationing was ended, average consumption fell from seven ounces per person per week to five ounces and the confectionery trade went into recession. Limitation of demand by price was never an issue; sweets were and still are comparatively cheap in Britain.

Nasty things on the food front

During the 1950s a new group of factors entered the diet of people over the whole world served by the market. Artificial fertilisers were brought in to replace the animal manures which were disappearing with the move to a mechanised agriculture. Chemical herbicides were introduced to eliminate the need for hoeing and good tilth which had always been regarded as the sine-qua-non of good agriculture. Insecticides were being increasingly used to deal with problems created by, among other things, monoculture: the giving over of large areas to a single crop with the consequent build-up of huge concentrations of parasites like potato eel-worm, carrot-fly, codling-moth, aphids. This problem was not entirely new. In the nineteenth century the phylloxera vine-louse from North America had devastated the European vineyards. After desperate attempts to deal with the invader by chemical means had failed, the growers decided to go nature's way. The European vines were grafted onto North American roots. These had evolved along with the phylloxera and were unattractive to the insect, interrupting its life-cycle.

No such wisdom has taken hold of the world's cultivators in the twentieth century. According to the Economist, in November 1984, a study of 3,000 Americans revealed only 30 of them without at least one kind of insecticide in their blood. And that is the good news. In Britain, while Labour governments have been complacent about such matters, the Thatcher administration was active in conspiring to prevent public health action on the subject and even to deny information to those outside government and the agrochemical industry. The final horrors are reserved for the Third World where chemicals are freely used which are banned even in slovenly Britain. The consequences are that up to 10,000 people a year there die from pesticide poisoning (Economist, 12 April 1986).

But where warning voices from the 1930's onwards have not been needed, the disciplines of the balance-sheet are beginning to be felt. To quote the Economist again:

Chemical solutions are expensive. Those that come from fossil fuels cost a small fortune to develop. Third world countries spend huge sums subsidising their use. In Egypt, for instance, agrochemical subsidies work out at an annual $5 a head.

Recently, the pace of agrochemical invention has slowed, while the evolution of resistance has accelerated. In the 1940's the United States lost 7 per cent of its agricultural crops to insects. Today it loses about 13 per cent.

Exeter University has a number of fast selling lines in insects which eat other insects. Name your enemy and they will try to supply you with an enemy of your enemy and therefore your friend. In Essex, an octogenarian, Lawrence D. Hills, who had been sending out warnings for decades about the way farming was going and being ignored or denounced as a fool for his pains, acquired a new intellectual respectability and was being listened to. Apart from his research into nature-based means of combating pests, Hills drew attention to the dangers inherent in concentrating agriculture on too narrow a genetic base, allowing thousands of plant varieties to disappear. On the Cotswolds farmer Joe Henson has set aside a reserve for rare and disappearing animal breeds. They will be needed.

A glance through any of those magnificent Victorian gardening manuals will remind the interested person of the specimens which have been lost, leaving only those varieties which fit the needs of the market fruit and vegetables which travel and store well and look good on the supermarket shelves, never mind that when you get them home they taste awful.

Nasty things happening on the agricultural front have been paralleled by equally nasty things in animal husbandry and poultry keeping.

During the latter part of the last century unwelcome amounts of fat were being urged on the public by the meat trade. The drive to intensive rearing of birds and animals had increased fat by decreasing mobility. At the same time the move from candles and rushlights made of animal fats to lamps fuelled by mineral oil increased the surplus. During the 1930's a sausage-maker Thomas Walls and Company solved the problem of mounting surplus fat by converting it into ice cream. Fifty years later nutrition experts were complaining that British sausages contained as little as 5 per cent meat, the rest being made up of fat and "rusk", a flour based absorber for the fat.

The problem of animal fat surpluses was brought to a crisis point by the development of petroleum-derived synthetic soaps — detergents — after World War II. This virtually ended the career of animal fats which for thousands of years had provided mankind with uses ranging from lighting, soap, and grease for his axles to waterproofing for his clothes and boots.

Another development of the decades following the War was the dosing of poultry and animals with chemicals, first to control disease, later to increase body weight. In the nineteen fifties a number of Swiss men had gone to their doctors complaining of strange symptoms: loss of facial hair, incipient breasts. These were found to derive from canned chicken imported from the US which contained significant residues of female hormone used to promote growth.

The Swiss promptly banned a wide range of American goods and a bitter commercial squabble developed. Since then the use of hormones has been extended to beef cattle and similar symptoms have shown up in places as far apart as Italy and Puerto Rico including mature breasts on baby girls of four years.

A corn and beef farmer of Truro, in Cornwall explained the circumstances to me like this:

If you inject a hormone pellet into the ear of a bullock, you can bring him to market in twenty months. If you don't, it will take twenty-four months to bring the animal to market, you will go bust and the bank will send the bailiffs in. The cost of feed will wipe out what you get for the beast. But I know a man who puts a pellet in each ear and one up the arse. He markets his animals in eighteen months and he is making a fortune!

A significant development for British agriculture at the beginning of the 1970's was the UK entry into the Common Market. This economic union began after the war with the linking up of some of the smaller countries into the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) Agreement and was then joined by Germany, France and Italy. At the beginning it was mainly an agricultural arrangement — the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy. British governments first ignored it, then tried repeatedly to sabotage it, then finally applied to join it.

The European Economic Community, to give its correct title, set about stimulating its agriculture to ensure European self-sufficiency, but also to protect its smaller farmers and thereby reduce social chaos. This ran counter to the trend of British thinking, which was that the market must decide and if the remaining peasants were driven to the wall, too bad. But the British were outvoted and an endless series of financial squabbles ensued.

Build-up of surpluses

Another consequence was the build-up of huge surpluses of every imaginable foodstuff. In 1986 nearly a million tons of beef, Fifteen million tons of grain, butter mountains, wine lakes, olive oil lakes, the dumping of millions of tons of fruit and vegetables. This was not new. In the thirties wheat was being dumped in the sea and fish was being dumped on the land and the Brazilians were firing their trains on coffee beans, but the surpluses were not on anything like the same scale. What was not new was that these surpluses were building up alongside massive deprivation among the people.

Good food was being destroyed while people were being driven to consume junk food, because it was cheaper (and because more housewives were being driven out to work because of economic pressures: unemployed husbands, debt, etc.) Canned, frozen or dried soups, dinners, instant mash, ready hash, custard without eggs, ice cream without cream, lemonade without lemons, fruit jelly without fruit, meat loaf without meat. And to make this rubbish palatable, a veritable witch's cauldron of chemical dyes, flavourings, and smells, entered the food industry. The consequences for health are still being discovered.

The consequences for the undeveloped world of the trade in food have been no less disastrous. In the Great Famine in Ireland of the 1840's people starved while wheat was being exported to England. In the great Ethiopian Famine of the 1980's fruit was being exported to Europe, fruit which could have saved lives.

Throughout the Third World fruit and vegetables are being produced by multinationals like United Brands of Boston, Massachusetts, and Unilever of Holland and Britain, on the best land in Central America and Africa for export to North America and Europe, while the local population is forced to survive on poor land, or worse, to become labourers on the latifundia of the big foreign companies. The power of these companies to influence, form, or destroy governments led in the inter-war years to the phenomenon of the Banana Republics, governments which were mere puppets of western multinational fruit companies.

It is difficult to find any aspect of food production in the modern world where the market can be said to exert a good influence. The mere fact of production for sale and not to satisfy needs, promotes an urge to grab the money and run, in all industries and services, but in food the results seem to be more catastrophic than anywhere else. Unfresh vegetables containing toxic chemical residues, meat with dangerous levels of antibiotics and hormones, fruit and vegetables which do not taste like fruit and vegetables used to taste, chocolate where the cocoa content has been reduced to the point where the Common Market Commissioners will not allow it to be called chocolate. The list is endless and depressing.

Another revealing development is a growing tendency for stock farmers to keep a particular animal for their own family which is raised the old way, without chemicals, and for fruit and vegetable growers to raise plants for their own consumption separate from those they send to market.

The good news, what little there is, lies in the discovery of the smarter entrepreneurs that "health" food, "organically" grown fruit and vegetables, chemically-free meat and poultry, is a growth market. White bread is a disaster area, commercially speaking, whereas the market demands more "stone-ground 100 per cent wholewheat" flour and bread than is available.

Ken Smith (Britain)

News in Review: Respectable revolt (1965)

The News in Review column from the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Respectable revolt

Straws which are currently in the wind of British capitalism are rumblings of militancy in the so-called middle class, and the re-occurrence of the plea for more unemployed.

Some teachers and doctors have recently considered withdrawing their labour power, the former from schools and the latter from the National Health Scheme. Their reasons, basically, were concerned with their pay.

Doctors and teachers have long considered the strike as unprofessional, and in bad taste. But capitalism does not exempt any worker from the need to fight to maintain and increase his standard of living; and if doctors and teachers remain quiescent their standard of living must suffer.

Before the war when unemployment was widespread the “secure” teachers grumbled about their pay. Doctors got their patients in a free market, and many in the poorest working class districts were little better off than their patients.

Now both groups are complaining about their financial rewards; they are finding that a sense of vocation is no weapon in this competitive society. So they are considering the withdrawal of their labour power—in other words, using the weapon which marks them as members of the working class.

There is another way of losing your pay.

Lord Plowden, former Chief Planning Officer and Chairman of the Economic Planning Board, also chairman of Tube Investment Co. Ltd., and director of four other companies, was reported in the Daily Telegraph in January as wanting . . . ”better use of the labour force . . . this would lead to transitional unemployment . . . to do everything possible to mitigate the resulting hardship.”

“This is what we mean when we say that we want increased productivity, and why should we be mealy-mouthed about it?”

Capitalists are not opposed to unemployment if they think it necessary. Plowden wants to replace the carrot with the stick, on the theory that there is nothing like a dose of unemployment to increase productivity.

Is Lord Plowden himself prepared to live on the dole? Or is that a fate reserved for the workers on whom he so coldly theorises? These are questions which no highly paid servant of capitalism should want to duck.

Unless, that is, he is being mealy mouthed.

Everlasting Milk

The news which came out during the first week of last month, that British scientists had developed a method of treating milk which will make it last for months, was greeted in the newspapers with all the customary enthusiasm.

The chairman of the Express Dairy, Mr. W. E. D. Bell, helped the enthusiasm along a bit by proclaiming: “At last, we can feed milk to the two-thirds of the world that is starving.” He might as well have said that at last they could break into a market which up to now has been held by dried milk, which is easier to handle and transport than the liquid.

The Express are not, of course, about to throw in their hand with OXFAM and become a charitable institution. They quickly set up a new company to deal with the export of the new milk. Orders have been received from Central America and some shipping lines, and more may follow from the British and United States Navies.

It was not the desire to feed the hungry which was responsible for this haste. Mr. Bell made it clear: “We must,” he said, “Pull our fingers out and get this project going before the Swiss or anybody move in.”

At the time of writing, the new process has not been approved by the government for milk sold on the home market. Exported milk is not covered by the need for official approval. If the new milk is approved for home distribution, there will probably be considerable savings for the dairy industry whose bugbear, like other branches of agriculture, has always been the expensive business of rush distribution.

Agriculture is as much tied to the need to make profits as any other industry, and it is constantly looking for ways around its distribution problems. Hence the development of massive, mechanised farms, of the broiler hen and the beef factories. Hence the rise of the frozen food industry.

Some people, derided as crackpots, have questioned the effects which all this has on the food. But as long as there is a profit to be made, or increased, who cares about quality? Capitalism encourages the shoddy rush job in many of its industries, and there is no reason why agriculture should be an exception.

This is the motive behind the everlasting milk. The Sunday Times thought that, apart from anything the Express will get out of the new product, “. . . it offers a way of giving the dairy farmers more for their milk without raising the price to the public.”

The profit priorities of capitalism affect every aspect of our lives. Everywhere we go, everything we wear, the very air we breathe, everything we eat and drink, is polluted by it. And all the time there is the smokescreen of hypocrisy about human interests—about, for example, feeding the world’s hungry when the real motive is to make life more comfortable yet for the privileged few.

Vietnam

For some reason, it has suddenly become fashionable for journalists to use some peculiar words about the war which is currently being fought in Vietnam.

They have called it the “unnecessary” war, the “tragic” war, the “forgotten” war. As if all wars are not tragic, unnecessary affairs.

The Americans, deeply involved, have their own description of the war. It is, they say a vital war, because it is being fought to defend freedom. Every time the American jets go in, President Johnson claims that they fire their rockets in the cause of liberty.

We are, as usual, invited to accept the story that in Vietnam one side (the North —theirs) stands for brutal dictatorship and the other (the South—ours) stands for liberty and brotherhood.

But the South Vietnamese have shown what they mean by freedom and brotherhood by the manner in which they maltreat their prisoners. One of their recent tricks was to use a wounded prisoner (who later died) as a human mine detector—to send him wading across a river to detonate any mines on the bed.

This is only one piece of the surface evidence which shows up that it is barefaced nonsense to claim that the war in Vietnam is for freedom. In fact, the United States are involved in the war for familiar, classical reasons.

They are interested in the strategic position of Vietnam, and in the bases which they have set up there. They are desperately concerned that the expanding Chinese threat to the established powers in the Far East should be held in cheek.

The British capitalist class, who have their own troubles a little further south, are reluctant to become involved in Vietnam. British influence in the Far East was extensively diminished during the last war, and although there is still a lot of British capital invested out there, the protection of it is largely the concern of the U.S.A.

The Soviet Union is also reluctant to get involved, but is having its hand forced. They also fear Chinese ambitions; hence the belligerent words from Moscow —which remain no more than words.

The Economist’s prophesy of the outcome of Premier Kosygin’s visit to Hanoi was remarkably accurate:

“Mr. Kosygin is virtually certain to proclaim . . . that (American) attacks would involve the risk of nuclear escalation. In exchange, the Russians may well urge the North Vietnamese not to push their present military advantage in the south too far.”

Vietnam is a typical local struggle in the wider conflict of interests between the great blocs of capitalism with China, struggling for its place in the world power line up, an aggravation. China’s belligerency is customary for an upstart capitalist power; customary also are the efforts which the established powers are making to stifle her.

This could mean that the Vietnam battle will not escalate (ugly word) into a major nuclear war. But mistakes and miscalculations have been known before.

If Vietnam does prove to be the first spark in a world wide conflagration the result will be an unnecessary war, a tragic war but one which, if there is any-one left to remember it, will not be forgotten.

Gordon-Walker and immigration

The defeat of Patrick Gordon-Walker at the so-called safe seat of Leyton provided both press and politicians with a field day for comment and speculation. A number of reasons for the surprise result were suggested; in a survey just after the by-election, The Observer placed coloured immigration at the head of the list, with Labour voters the majority to voice dissatisfaction on this problem.

When the Conservative government introduced a bill curbing the flow of immigrants into this country, the Labour Opposition resisted it, creating the impression that they were in favour of unlimited free entry. Disastrously for a party seeking mass support, they overlooked the political climate. It is possible that their slender majority at the general election was caused partly by this. Gordon-Walker had the job of opposing the Tory bill in Parliament and this has made him an obvious whipping boy in what the press is fond of calling the white backlash.

At Smethwick, his Conservative opponent, by using an extremist minority as his supporters, played on the electorate’s prejudices, and their fears of the growth of a large coloured population in Britain. While the fascists ranted and raved and worked on a suppressed sore, the Tories got the benefit. At Leyton the racial question and immigration were smothered by the three main candidates, but Gordon-Walker was pestered by Nazi gadflies.

Most workers, irrespective of colour and race, fear a sudden mass influx of foreign workers because they see them as a threat to their jobs and as an aggravation of the housing shortage. On top of this is a fear that people coming from less developed areas may be willing to accept lower wages and social standards.

Immigrants have entered Britain before, but they have been mainly European and were therefore quickly assimilated. It would, for example, be difficult to trace the whereabouts of the Germans who came to Britain in Edwardian times. The recent wave of immigrants is vastly different. The colour of their skin makes it impossible for them to be quickly submerged and forgotten. They stimulate a multitude of primitive fears among the working class.

But what will happen if the coloured population of this country increases enormously? Most coloured people are just part of the working class, subject to the same rough end of the economic stick as their white brothers. In time the demands of industrialism will destroy their own customs and they will appear similar to the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Poles etc, that go to make up the British population.

Smethwick, Leyton and Gordon-Walker are examples of how it is impossible to operate vague humanitarian concepts in a capitalist society. The government has in fact already announced much stricter screening of coloured immigrants at the points of entry. Thus do capitalism and a non-socialist working class destroy the best laid plans of mice and men.

Behind the label (2004)

Book Review from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not on the label by Felicity Lawrence, Penguin, £7.99

Most of us are probably aware that our food is not quite what it’s cracked up to be, even if it’s not all junk food. But in this book, the Guardian’s consumer affairs correspondent shows just how unhealthy much of what we eat is and why it gets to be that way.

   

One important point made relates to the dominant position of the supermarkets, especially the large chains. They can squeeze the profits of the companies who produce the food, sometimes asking suppliers to pay to have their products on the shelves or in some prominent position. In addition they effectively dictate what we can buy, or at least what range of goods we can choose from when we shop. With their absurd ideas about the kind of food that is acceptable to consumers – such as specific sizes of green beans or Brussels sprouts – they cause an awful lot of decent food to go to waste.

   

Their enormous distribution centres are not real warehouses, since food is only kept in them for short periods: the idea is that it is delivered and then sent across the country to stores in as rapid a turnover as possible, leading to vast numbers of lorries speeding up and down the motorways. And, according to Lawrence, there is evidence that the more miles fruit and veg travels, the lower its vitamin content. Such constant replenishment of the distribution centres relies heavily on casual labour, often undertaken at rock-bottom rates in appalling conditions by migrant workers, a supply of labour that can be turned on and off like a tap, as the supermarkets constantly change their demands for food. It is a workforce that ranges from Portuguese workers in East Anglia to Moroccans in Spain.

   

A further consequence of the retailers’ power is that the suppliers work on decreasing profit margins, and often cannot even afford to get rid of waste (such as diseased carcasses) properly. Chicken factories are now enormous production lines, where a single infected bird can cause thousands to become contaminated with campylobacter. Unwanted skin is made into chicken nuggets, while chicken for sandwiches and ready meals is commonly adulterated with water (plus various additives to keep the water in, including cow waste).

   

Returning to supermarkets, you may have been impressed by the ‘in-store’ bakeries that a lot of them have. In fact, many of these just finish off bread that has been made and partially baked elsewhere. White sliced bread is often sold at a loss, to get people into the shops. Most of it is made by the thoroughly nasty-sounding Chorley-wood bread process, which involves air and water being added to the dough, plus fats to stop the bread collapsing. Ready meals, which have massively increased in popularity over the last few years, are high in processed fats, sugars and starch. Modified starch also plays a big part in low-fat yoghurts, which are not as healthy as they sound. Did you know that a “strawberry-flavoured” yoghurt has at least some strawberry content, but a “strawberry-flavour” yoghurt does not?

   

The kind of food available to workers has changed dramatically over the last few decades, with curries and pastas that were not previously available now regularly finding their way to our gullets. But that certainly does not mean that people now eat better and more healthily. Lawrence makes it clear that considerations of profit are what drive the way the food industry works. Her suggestion is to shop on three principles: local, seasonal and direct. But a better answer is to establish a system of society where food is produced for need not profit.

Paul Bennett

The Bread that Perishes and Those who Make it. (1908)

From the December 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like Pouring Water in a Sieve.

Far back in the last century the Baker’s Union was formed, and although it has never enjoyed the confidence of a majority of the men engaged in bread-making, or, with the single exception of the ’89 agitation, has it contained more than a remnant within its ranks, yet probably 95 per cent. of the London bakers have been members at one time or another. They have entered its ranks, paid one or two quarters’ subscription, then, generally through disgust with the internal management, have gone to swell the lapsed, and been lost. The remnant who remain in the union recognise it for what it really is—a provident society—though they do not all understand that, in the final analysis, it operates in the interests of the master class.

The capitalist, in permitting trades unions to have a legal status, demands that they shall serve him further than the mere friendly society. This is done by all trade unions guaranteeing that their members shall not strike spontaneously, thus giving the capitalist time to prepare himself for any eventuality. The bakers do even better. In every district they have a house of call, where the unemployed foregather and await the masters’ convenience. As journeymen bakers invariably go in to work on Sunday evenings with curses on their lips, and as that is the time usually chosen to give the rack another twist, it sometimes happens that a spontaneous strike takes place. When this occurs the master rushes off to the nearest club house, where he can obtain all the men he wants. Thus trade unionists are always available to break the strike of non-union or union men. The most stoney-eyed can see how useful this is to the masters.

Putting Their Faith in the Enemy.

It is necessary for the officials of trade unions, in order to maintain their positions, to advertise themselves, and to prevent the dry rot of apathy among their followers putting a period to their existence as leaders, to invent at intervals a new slogan, such as the “All Grades Movement,” “Abolition of Night Work,” etc. The latter has been the rallying cry of the Bakers for several years past, and the pence diverted from the semi-starved wives and children of the operatives, have been spent in organising public meetings to force the bill for the abolition of night work and the limitation of the hours of labour through the Imperial Parliament, and also to pay the expenses of delegates to the House of Commons. These genuflected before Liberal, Lib-Lab and Lab-Lib M.P.s, humbly beseeching their help in pushing the “Charter of Emancipation” through. At the public meetings the men were assured by hired speakers that no compromise would be considered. The damnable system of night work was to cease. The abominable slavery of 80 to 100 hours a week was to be kicked into the limbo of the past. Many arguments were advanced to show the sweet reasonableness of their “demands,” the most nauseating being the cant of the “Christian Socialists.” Everything was working up for the final onslaught, when, as invariably happens in trade union agitations, as the hour of deliverance was about to strike, there came the anti-climax.

Dilly, Dilly Come and be Killed.

A cold douche quenched any hopes that might be still, flicking in the breasts of the oft-deluded operatives in the form of a circular letter to the branches of the union. This letter ran as follows :

“I am directed by my Committee to ask your members to approve of the proposed alteration in the Eight Hours Bill.

We consider that the Bill stands an infinitely better chance of passing with the clause deleted and personally I believe that even if the Bill in its present form was to pass its second reading that particular clause would come out in committee. By deleting it we at once disarm three-fourths of the opposition to the measure which has hitherto been based largely upon the alleged impossibility (if the Bill were passed) of supplying the early morning roll and restaurant trade.

Factory bakery proprietors say, not without reason, that it would handicap them in competing with the small shops, and some of the larger shops object on the score of the very large amount of capital they would have to spend in building additional bake houses.

Some of the Liberal M.P.s whom we recently interviewed expressed the opinion that as a matter of policy there is no doubt that it would be far and away the best to make the issue a clear and straight one of Long Hours v. Short Hours, and not to give the employers the opportunity of going off on a side issue.

Of course, the districts which have day work would still be able to retain it by trade union action, and others might regain it by the same method.

Yours very truly,

Louis A. Hill,

29 May, 1908.”

Absurdity can go No Further.

Can anyone conceive of a document drafted with a more tender solicitude for the welfare of the enemy, the capitalist wolves? It abandons the main position under cover of presenting a straight issue. The one clause that did stand a dog’s chance of getting on to the statute book, and being enforced when there, was the night work clause, for the very cogent reason that an overwhelming case could be made out to prove that it is necessary in order to ensure that foodstuffs should be produced under wholesome conditions. Many bakers have collected ample materials to prove that bakeries, not only the catacomb bakeries, but some of the more modern factories, are centres for the propagation and dissemination of loathsome infections and contagious diseases, and that this state of affairs is the lowering of the vitality, and consequent disease among the operatives caused by night work and the long hours which are possible only under that system.

Let Criticism Begin At Home.

That, and the question of wholesome ingredients, must be dealt with from a Socialist workman’s point of view. When I have leisure, and as I am fast approaching the “scrapping age,” it shall be done. Once get the howling pack of Christian profit-hunters, who shriek anathemas at Leopold the Amorous from our garden city suburbs for the atrocities perpetrated in the collection of “red rubber” on the Congo, and who view with callous indifference the cruel slaughter of their compatriots in the production of white bread, to realise that this system re-acts against their material interests, the only chord to which they respond, that these flagrant outrages against the laws of Nature spell for them, too, impaired health, disease, and its consequent loss of treasure, and your precious reform is accomplished, nay, is forced on you, willy-nilly, and you would not be consulted on the matter.*

As regards the straight issue, Long v. Short Hours, the veriest political tyro knows the powerful interests which oppose the principle of limiting men’s labour by legal enactment, knows that the bell-wethers of the miners, those “gaseous vertibrates,” called labour leaders, cannot lead their followers to victory. Miners number many more thousands than bakers do tens, are splendidly organised from a trade union point of view, and have been “demanding” the eight hours’ day for twenty-five years, If the miners are in such a parlous state what chance do the poor bakers stand, except by frightening the capitalist parties through their stomachs ?

Twenty Four Hour Day Not Sufficient.

The peremptory stoppage of night work would automatically curtail the hours of labour, as is well known to the masters’ spokesmen. If a man started work at 6 a.m. and wrought till midnight he would only then have completed an eighteen hours’ day, whereas it is not uncommon for a baker to see the clock round twice at the week-end. Every baker knows that it breaks a master’s heart to see his men go home at ten o’clock in the morning, after having done twelve hours slogging. The day is at its busiest, and under a score of pretexts first one hour then another is added to the night’s work until one night is driven into the next, and the baker is robbed of all that makes life endurable. He comes out late in the day completely exhausted, his eyes are dazzled by the daylight; and if he takes one “half ale” he is fuddled, two and he is “blindo.” The nasty, drunken beast !

The last sentence in Mr. Hill’s letter is comic in view of the position of the cotton operatives, the awful plight of the railway men, and the utter rout of “the most powerful and the most perfect type of trade union in the world,” the engineers. The fact is the bakers can obtain nothing by trade union organisation, nor could they if 95 per cent. were organised. Their position has gradually become worse, their skill is fast becoming needless, they are being reduced to the status of the unskilled labourers, who can, and are, taking their places as machine tenders. They are a diminishing number, owing to the introduction of machinery doubling and redoubling the output per man in what is a limited trade, and while their nominal wages have risen slightly, their real wages have gone down considerably, for they have lost their allowance of bread and flour, sack money (which at one time amounted to several shillings weekly), yeast money, millers’ Xmas boxes, and other extras, and by mid-week many of them are “broke to the world,” as they phrase it—yet they never spend any money. Their jobs are more precarious, and they are “scrapped” at an earlier age as regular hands and become jobbers—especially now they are so inconsiderate as to lie down and die in the bake-house, or drop down in the street as they wend homeward.

No reform or series of reforms can touch that position. No trade union can act even as a brake to steady the downward rush. As the years roll by capital gets more aggressive, more relentless and its engines of death act with more deadly precision. The trade union is a spent force: capital can no longer be fought with the velvet glove. The only effective means is an economic revolution. The issue has too long been obscured by the thousands of tricky liars who prostitute their talents for grub. None have done it so effectively, or so cheaply to the capitalist, as those who have posed as labour leaders and dissipated the energies of the working class by focussing their attention on this or that trumpery reform that does not matter, while pumping an income from the stomachs of the starving women and children of the proletariat. Signs are manifold that their baneful influence is at last waning. We are now face to face with the fact that the class ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth, in the final analysis, spells, not “race suicide,” but race murder. There is no other name for it. There is no social problem to the Socialist. He has the key to the situation. He alone recognises with joy that society is in the melting-pot of the Social Revolution, and that the issue will be—must be—Socialism or annihilation.

J. Smith.

* Since this was written Mr. Haldane has said (Ladybank, Sept 26) that the Government “had to deal with the prevention of diseases among the poor, in the interest not merely of the individual, but of the State.”

Letter: Canteen (2000)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Canteen

Dear Editors,

Recently at my school, the council changed the cafeteria system. Before, there was one queue and it looked a bit like a proper café. Now it ‘s a McDonalds-style restaurant. It has four queues so that as many staff as possible are working at the same time. The school says that its because they want to serve us quicker but it’s really because they want the staff in the cafeteria to work harder so that our rulers get more money. The first thing I thought when I saw it was that it may cost some money to make it like this, but as the nearest McDonald’s is about a mile away and that the pupils actually like junk food like this, they would get a monopoly on the food sales for pupils at that school, and also get some more money for “our” rulers. I told someone I was walking about with that, the food had better be better than the other food we used to get. Yeah, right. At least the food they used to sell was half-decent, and although it was probably GM, the energy that I got from it gave me the energy to endure their attempts to indoctrinate me into believing that capitalism is the right way to live.

Now, the food is rubbishy—it is all mass-produced—and you have a choice of a burger, fries and a soft drink; a bit of pizza, fries and soft drink or a sandwich in which the roll is shaped for a hotdog. The burger is tasteless, the fries are soggy, the pizza is a cheap pizza base with a bit of cheese on it and the soft drinks are flat. In the pizza meal they even put the fries in the pizza box to save money on cardboard. When I was eating this I thought “That at least I only have to stand for this for the next two years” (I’m in third year). They have even introduced a card system in which you have a credit card-like card which if you swipe it on a machine in the school, it tells you how much money you have on it and your name.

The school probably have an account of how much you have spent on this rubbish to see if you have fallen for it. I’m sorry I don’t have any photos of the cafeteria, but think of what a McDonald’s looks like inside and change the name to “kids” and the main colour to red and you will be close enough.

Richard Cumming, 

Glasgow

Pathfinders: Withdrawal symptoms (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism, a sophisticated global society of cooperative common ownership, would face a number of urgent legacy problems if established today.

One of these is world hunger, with its related diseases, from which around 10,000 children and 15,000 adults die every day. Globally some progress has occurred, but almost one in ten people remain undernourished.

Weirdly though, more children are obese today than underweight. According to a UN report covering 190 countries, whereas in 2000 almost 13 percent were underweight compared to 3 percent obese, today the figures are respectively 9.2 and 9.4 percent.

Global obesity levels have tripled since 1970, with most commentators attributing the problem to the widespread post-war production of cheap and ultra-processed food, though it may have begun even earlier. Diets have become progressively less healthy since the Industrial Revolution, when toxic compounds like red lead and green arsenic were used as factory food colourings.

Profits flow from making us fat, even while obesity is stigmatised. Eight of the ten most obese countries are in the South Pacific, possibly implying a genetic element. But the rest of the world is not far behind. Generally speaking, the only places not obese are those starving.

Modern capitalism is a smorgasbord of high-calorie fast food which, along with sedentary online living, constitutes what are called ‘obesogenic environments’. But personal choice is also involved. Sugar isn’t addictive as such, but does induce a dopamine hit that can be. How would socialism deal with addictions? The need to solve hunger is a no-brainer, but lifestyle choices are more ethically tricky. If our collective behaviour is making us ill, then it places a load on health services. One way to think about a socialist ‘economy’ is to ask, not ‘shall I have X’, but ‘are other people prepared to put in labour so that I can have X?’ Lifestyle isn’t just personal, it’s political.

Nutrition is a difficult subject. We’re not even sure how our own metabolism works. In the 2010s, evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer set out to study metabolism in hunter-gatherers, specifically the Hadza of Tanzania, to see how their active lifestyles burned up calories. His findings rocked the scientific world. It turned out that, though tribal males might walk or run around ten miles a day, or maybe six for women carrying children, they burned off no more calories than a desk-bound clerk in Manhattan or Manchester. Convinced this had to be a mistake, Pontzer repeated the study with other groups, in other countries, and got the same result. The implications for the global diet industry, worth hundreds of billions, and the global sports fitness industry, worth trillions, are devastating. If Pontzer is right, diet and exercise are not linked but independent processes, so you can’t just trade off the one against the other, that is, you can’t run three miles and then allow yourself a doughnut. His ingenious working theory, as explained in a recent Babbage interview for The Economist, is that organisms don’t just go about doing their random daily thing and then pay off the calorie bill afterwards, somewhat like capitalist consumers. Instead they’re more like capitalist investors, looking for a long-term payoff in terms of reproductive success, and ‘fronting up’ the calorie investment in advance. Thus, we have a daily ‘calorie budget’ which we can invest wisely or poorly. We’ll certainly allocate 300 calories, the equivalent of a 5k run, for our large human brains. If we don’t spend our remaining budget on physical activity, it will end up being spent on other internal processes which also use energy, like the endocrine system (hormone production, for example testosterone or cortisol) or the immune system. With excess ‘fuel’ at their disposal, these systems may go into dangerous overdrive, producing auto-immune inflammations, stress-related diseases and cancers prevalent in urban western societies but unknown among the Hadza.

All of which brings new resonance to the phrase ‘armchair socialist’. How exactly a democratic global cooperative society would deal with addiction-related health problems is not really for us to say today. What it wouldn’t do is make the problem worse. In capitalism, all industries exist to make profits, even at the expense of killing us. State governments try to impose legal limitations, but vested interests and regulatory capture make this a permanent arms race.

The food industry is hardly alone in treating your body as a rubbish dump. Other industries have bequeathed us microplastic-polluted brains, ‘forever chemicals’, and the US opioid epidemic, to name just three. To see the ultimate direction of travel for unfettered capitalist markets, just look at organised crime. Take ‘kush’, for instance (or rather, don’t). Kush is a highly addictive and dirt-cheap synthetic opioid several times stronger than fentanyl, and now rampant across West Africa.

Quite apart from causing delirium and psychosis, it suppresses the appetite, lowering the body’s ability to fight off diseases and results in flesh-eating sores, and swollen limbs. It also results in STDs that women get by selling sex to pay for the kush. It involves no expensive opium or cannabis plantations, but instead uses cheap synthetic compounds (sources: China, Netherlands, UK) which you can cook for next to nothing in a garage. It’s also a cinch to transport because it doesn’t smell and just a tiny amount is needed to knock people brainless. The drug producers are no doubt delirious with joy at making such a killing, which they are doing, literally by the thousand: ‘It’s killing so many people that the mayor of Freetown [Sierra Leone] has had to set up a dedicated burial team to pick up abandoned bodies in the streets. These mass burials and cremations have been going on since 2022’ (Economist podcast).

Socialism’s legacy problems might be tricky where personal choice is involved. Without the profit motive though, there’ll simply be no point in producing foods and drugs that kill people, even if that could involve some withdrawal symptoms.

Paddy Shannon

Life and Times: Veganuaries – do they work? (2025)

The Life and Times column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is veganism weird? That’s the question the organisation behind Veganuary asked recently on their website as they urged people to go vegan for January and then, if possible, to carry on with it forever. Of course, their answer was no, it isn’t weird. In fact, they said, it’s ‘part of something huge’. And they had various celebrities on their site backing them, eg Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Eilish, Chris Packham, Sarah Pascoe. Their statement of intent was: ‘Our vision is simple; we want a vegan world. A world without animal farms and slaughterhouses. A world where food production does not decimate forest, pollute rivers and oceans, exacerbate climate change, and drive wild animal populations to extinctions’.

Animal welfare

This took me back many years to when I was a student and anything but a vegan or even vegetarian. I remembered being openly (and immaturely) contemptuous of a fellow student who was vegetarian. Little did I know that many years later I myself would decide to go vegetarian and then a long time after that – fairly recently in fact – vegan.

How did that happen? Well, I became a vegetarian when I found the idea of eating the flesh of another sentient being too difficult. Later – much later – when a vegan friend suggested I attend an online talk by a leading advocate of plant-based eating, the suffering dairy farming brought to animals was also brought home to me and I saw no alternative but to go the whole hog and move to veganism. The speaker, Dr Klaper, described as ‘an internationally recognized clinician, teacher and speaker on diet and health’, told us he had himself grown up on a dairy farm in the USA and that seemed to make his talk on ‘The Most Powerful Strategy for Healing People and the Planet’ all the more authentic. I also found it impressive in that he avoided being openly proselytising, simply sticking to simple facts in three key areas: animal cruelty, human health, and the environment. While the animal cruelty area was the one of most immediate interest to me, I also appreciated the case he put forward in the other two, even if I could think of some counter-arguments from opponents.

Veganism effective?

But what about Veganuary? It’s certainly possible that, if it does result in more people going vegan or vegetarian on a permanent basis or at least eating less meat or fish, it might lead to a reduction in the cruelty suffered by animals. But would it do much to lessen the hold of animal agriculture over the world’s food supply and reduce the raising and slaughtering of vast number of animals almost everywhere An argument often heard that says it wouldn’t, because the relative monopoly over food production held by a small number of big producers means that, even if they respond to a ‘market’ need to produce vegan ‘alternatives’ (as some of them are in fact doing), the effect of this will just be to increase their profits and investment power, so allowing them to produce meat and milk products more cheaply and more enticingly than before and thereby potentially increase animal suffering and exploitation.

And would an increase in veganism do much to solve the climate and environmental problems that the current system’s unbridled quest for ‘growth’ and profit has brought about? Some of the effects of what is happening were outlined in a recent article for the Earth/Food/Life project by Vicky Bond, animal welfare scientist and president of the US-based Humane League. She wrote:

‘Factory farming touches every aspect of our planet, from emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to contaminating the groundwater, rivers, lakes, and streams we rely on for fresh water. Factory farms house animals in crowded and often filthy conditions, subjecting millions of cows, chickens, and pigs to the worst forms of abuse for the entirety of their short lives. Driven by the demand for cheap eggs, meat, and dairy, the animal agriculture industry has disastrous consequences for the planet’.

She went on to reveal that in 2024 animal agriculture accounted for almost a third of fresh water used globally and that, every day in the US, it withdrew 2 billion gallons of water from freshwater resources. One of the reasons she gave for this was the large quantities of water used by slaughterhouses both in electrified stun baths and in scalding tanks for feathering chickens. She went on: ‘Because this method of slaughter is so terrifying for chickens, they also use vast amounts of water to clean feces and vomit from the chickens’ bodies afterwards’ (tinyurl.com/5yz7crxf).

Feeding the beast

Yet it is clear that, even if there were a significant reduction in meat-eating and so in animal agriculture, as Bond would like, the environment would continue to be polluted and the climate would keep on warming owing to the demands of the economic system we live under, that untameable ‘beast’ of production for profit. Faced with the system’s need to feed the beast, our food choices would do little to contribute to stopping or reversing ecological deterioration or global warming.

It is decades too late now for me to apologise to that fellow student for ridiculing his choice of vegetarianism. Of course, I would if I could, since I feel that in a sense that we are ‘on the same side’. But, having said that, nothing in the Socialist Party’s case for a moneyless, marketless society of free access and voluntary cooperation demands adherence to any particular kind of diet. That is, and will always be, a matter of personal choice. But the fact is that, choice of diet apart, the Earth has sufficient resources to feed (and house and clothe) all its inhabitants to a highly comfortable level a number of times over, once we, the human species, decide to put our natural capacity for cooperation and collaboration to full use and apply those resources to make sure that all – whether they choose to be vegan, vegetarian or anything else – have enough healthy food to eat and the certainty of a decent, secure life. Failing this, under the existing worldwide system of production for profit and buying and selling, those who do not have money to buy will go hungry, very many more will lead insecure and highly stressed existences, human health will not be well safeguarded, and the ecosystem will continue to be in imminent danger of collapse.

Howard Moss

Your good health (1985)

From the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

How healthy are you? Good health and fitness have recently become a very popular pursuit and stylised in fashionable culture and music. We are progressively bombarded with adverts for commodities to improve our bodies with "one calorie per can. nutrasweet drinks, jams with "40 per cent less sugar", low-fat spreads and vitamin-fortified. high fibre cereals. The wholemeal market has expanded from the odd loaf to a wide range of breads, pastas and even snack bars. What were once fringe groups like the advocates of Ginseng or jogging are now part of a much larger social group seeking improved health. Sports wear, including hi-tech trainers, track suits and designer-label tennis shirts, has become a theme in contemporary fashion. Good health and fitness are. of course, desirable objectives but the problem is that so many aspects of our lives today militate against their attainment.

For the privileged minority of men and women in capitalism the achievement of good health, if desired, is no problem. The consumption of first rate cuisine, a hygienic and comfortable environment, plenty of exercise in pools and on sunny beaches and a stress-free existence are conducive of putting you in good shape. For the majority of us, however, things are a lot more difficult. With careful planning and dedication a certain number of workers do become quite fit; people with a passion for active sport for instance. But generally workers cannot enjoy a life fit as a fiddle. Pursuing a clean bill of health in capitalism is like trying to swim against the flow of a river. How, then, is your health damaged by the society in which you live?

Medical health

In a society where money speaks louder than need it is not surprising that the provision of medical care for the majority is in such a sick state. If you can afford the £1,000 a day charged by private hospitals such as Harley Street's London Clinic there is no real cause for alarm. But the majority of people are not in this situation. Hospital services for the wealth-producers are being cut because of the economic recession: 

Guy's hospital has agreed to axe 300 jobs and close 63 beds by the autumn to cope with the financial crisis. . . General Medicine and surgery units will suffer most. Their outpatients will be cut by 30 per cent and they will lose 42 beds, including some in the chest and infectious disease wards., (Guardian, 1 July 1985)

Department of Health figures issued in March 1983 showed that more than 2.000 medical doctors had been rendered socially useless, suffering from the economic illness of unemployment. To aggravate the problem still further, many medical brains have been bribed by the military services to help them improve the techniques of bacteriological and bio-chemical warfare, which in turn has drawn away many more medical brains from treating patients to research and compose reports about the predictable effects of a nuclear war. One such report, issued after "nearly two years' hard work", was produced by a team of highly skilled consultants. general practitioners and professors. Its findings are not relaxing to read:

Delay in treatment would result in a high incidence of wound infection. Ruptured drainage and sewage systems together with the presence of decaying corpses and animal carcasses would increase enormously the hazards of infection. Major radioactivity would add the problems of radiation sickness to those already wounded. . . The psychogenic effects of such a disaster can only be conjectured. . . It is apparent that any schemes in existence would be completely inadequate to deal effectively with such a situation. (The Report of the British Medical Association Board of Science and Education Inquiry into the Medical Effects of Nuclear War)

In the relentless quest for profit, medical drug companies have often been found guilty of gross negligence or rank unscrupulousness. The leading Swiss company Ciba-Geigy has admitted that it placed unprotected Egyptian children in a field so that a crop-spraying airplane could douse them with the insecticide Galecron. The object was to test the children's urine for toxic levels of the liquid, which was subsequently linked with cancer. The biggest chemical conglomerate in Britain. ICI, has also admitted that it promoted an expensive and dangerous anabolic steroid as a wonder cure for malnourished children in Bangladesh. And these are probably no more the only culprits of such malpractice than Richard Nixon and Profumo are the only dishonest politicians of our time.

The environment

The commercial profit system operates worldwide and. because it puts a priority on the making of a profit for the few, all other interests — including those of the majority of people and our environment — are subordinated to this end. If it is cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to pollute the atmosphere rather than to safely dispose of toxic waste, then the atmosphere gets polluted. The National Wildlife Federation in America reported recently on the increasing problem of acid rain. Sulphur-dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants are damaging forests, fouling lakes and streams; in some parts of California fog is 2,000 times as acidic as natural fog and capable of burning the eyes and throat. More than 26 million tons of sulphur are emitted in the USA every year and the amount is increasing. Mr Kirk Willison, a spokesman for the Edison Electrical Institute, has opposed moves to ban such practices "because of the costs that pollution control would involve" (Daily Telegraph, 11 May 1984). Dangerous pesticides are often marketed with high pressure campaigns. with all sorts of dire results. DDT was withdrawn from the market last year but. as two investigators from Friends of the Earth recently discovered (posing as farmers). it is still possible to get this damaging substance from certain agrochemical suppliers. Chris Rose. FOE's countryside campaigner was reported in Farmers' Weekly as saying:

This was a question of cash on the counter and no questions asked. . . Allowing the sale of DDT is almost unbelievable negligence . . . obviously the company is keen on making a quick buck by flogging poisons even if they are banned.

Malnutrition

Not only do millions of people die from malnutrition each year (Oxfam has estimated the number of malnourishment-related deaths annually at 30,000.000) but millions more just "go hungry" or suffer the effects of an unhealthy diet. According to the United Nations International Emergency Children's Fund over 1,700 children die every sixty minutes (one every 2 seconds) from disease, malnutrition and war-caused disruption. This sort of sacrifice on the altar of profit also happens closer to home. Take one recent case. In August twin sisters aged 2½. died of malnutrition in Essex while their unemployed father was away from home, perhaps taking Norman Tebbit's advice, looking for work. The tragic twist to this particular story was the expertise of the unemployed father — he was a cook (Guardian, 3 August 1985). The social madness of such suffering is that, not only could we produce enough food for every human being to lead a healthy life (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that using current farming methods the world could produce enough food for 33.000,000.000 people — seven times the world population) but that even today so much food and drink is produced but left to rot or be re-cycled because it cannot be sold at a profit.

Millions of litres of surplus Common Market wine, equivalent in its present distilled form to the contents of 16.000 Olympic swimming pools, should be converted into boiler fuel according to a House of Lords select committee report. (Guardian. 25 July 1985)

The Common Market's butter mountain recently reached a record level of 600,000 tonnes, adding to the gastronomic scenery of milk lakes and beef mountains. Despite the enormity of suffering from malnutrition it is still conventional wisdom for the "experts" and their journalistic echoes to refer to such food and drink as "surplus stock". The measuring rod of need in capitalism is. necessarily, not what people need but rather what the market can absorb. The Live Aid concerts earlier this year highlighted the unnecessary suffering of so many people but. clearly, the occasional well-intentioned handouts to the starving cannot solve a problem which is endemic in a society which dances to the tune of the cash register.

Employment

Employment is a euphemism for exploitation. Selling your energies to someone else or a company for your whole vital life, so that the hirer can get wealthy from your efforts, is not the formula for a healthy existence. When people work at home for their families or friends it is usually rewarding and pleasurable. But being constantly alienated from what your efforts produce for your employer is a depressing experience. In the context of employment work becomes nothing more than the reluctantly performed grind necessary to earn a living. Wherever you work — office, factory, school, hospital or mine — the conditions are usually less than extravagant, aimed at maximum productivity rather than your best health and safety. Every aspect of most working environments, including lighting, heating and cleanliness, are not what they could be. Over 1,500 people die every year as a result of their work and courts are always hearing cases of industrial accidents which could have been avoided but for unsafe but cost-saving conditions at work. The independent Office of Health Economics has reported how fear of losing their jobs is forcing more sick workers to work.

Unemployment

Enforced idleness and social uselessness takes an obvious toll, not only on its direct victims but also on their dependants. A government report at the beginning of this decade showed how unemployment leads to increased ill-health, psychological disturbance and alcoholism. Symptoms detailed in the report include depression accompanied by "insomnia, loss or gain of weight, suicidal thoughts, impulsive or violent outbursts and an increased use of alcohol or tobacco". Among physical symptoms are asthma, skin lesions, backaches and headaches. Perhaps not surprisingly, this report was not made universally accessible — only 200 copies were printed and put on sale at £6 each.

Drug abuse

In all sorts of ways the profit system offers bleak prospects for most workers. Either the routine drudge of boring work or the frustration and hopelessness of life on the dole. The pressures become the more unendurable during a deep recession, especially for the millions of young people with so much potential creativity and energy. In this sort of setting the escapism afforded by mood-altering drugs is likely to become more popular. with all the misery that is its consequence. The proliferation of the use of heroin and of solvent-abuse over the last few years is a measure of the deep dissatisfaction an increasing number of people are feeling about the sort of society they live in. The suicide rate is dramatic enough — there are on average about 12 suicide attempts every day — but for many others the regular use of these drugs means life that is almost like suicide. The statistics are not very reliable but a figure of 50,000 heroin addicts in Britain is sometimes quoted. Addressing the drug dealers, Thatcher has warned "We are after you” and Edward Gardner, chairman of a recent House of Commons all-party committee. advocated that drug dealers should be hung (while army recruitment officers have medals put around their necks). But this sort of policy cannot be successful because it seeks to tamper with the symptom of a social malady rather than its cause.

War

Wars are the extension of the economic quarrels of governments over new markets to exploit, new territories rich in mineral deposits. trade routes and strategic locations on the trade map. It is not "human nature" which impels young men (and now, in many armies, young women) to go out and murder complete strangers; it is usually conscription or the fomenting of hysterical jingoistic fervour against "the enemy", as was seen during the Falklands war. From Belfast to Beirut to Baghdad and in a score of other current wars people are being killed and maimed every day, with all the grief and despair for so many others that this leaves in its wake. It has been estimated that "The number of people around the world who are involved in wars of the old-fashioned, death producing kind comes, at a rough count, to about 701,600,000 . . . (Sunday Times, 21 March 1982). The emergency children's fund, Unicef, working in 112 countries, has a total annual income equivalent to about 4 hours of world spending on the war machines. Capitalism is not about caring for people and therefore cannot put a priority on health. One army general is paid more than five state enrolled nurses.

Getting healthy

Socialists cannot object to workers trying to get as fit and healthy as they can. but it cannot be denied that the sort of society we live in makes this a very difficult task. Class-divided society, the rat-race, is a squalid struggle for most people and only with its abolition can we seriously begin to take pleasure in individually and socially enjoying robust good health. If music is the food of love, knowledge is the food of desirable social change. The socialist case contains no artificial flavourings or election promises, just wholesome food for thought. Bon appetit.

Gary Jay