According to the UN, now at the end of the 20th century, of the world’s population of some 6 billion, over one billion lack access to safe drinking water while 800 million don’t get enough food.
Why is this? Is it because we don’t have the resources to produce the extra food, pipes and pumps, and health facilities? No, since the resources are there. Here are the views of two prominent scientists:
“Industry’s problem will be to find sources of energy which are inexhaustible and can be restored with a minimum of effort. Until now we have produced steam with the help of chemical energy released by burning coal: but coal is difficult to mine and its deposits decrease from day to day. Man should turn his thoughts to the utilisation of solar heat and heat from the earth’s interior. There is reason to hope that both sources will be used boundlessly. To bore a well of 3,000 to 4,000 metres is not beyond the powers of present-day engineers, let alone those of the future. The source of all heat and of all industry will thus be unlocked and if water is taken into consideration as well, all imaginable machinery on earth could operate, and there would not be any noticeable decrease in this source of energy in hundreds of years”.
And,
“It is the energy of the sun, stored up in coal, in waterfalls, in food, that practically does all the work of the world. How great is the supply the sun lavishes upon us becomes clear when we consider that the heat received by the earth under a high sun and a clear sky is equivalent, according to the measurements of Langley, to about 7,000 horse-power per acre. Though our engineers have not yet discovered how to utilise this enormous supply of power, they will, I have not the slightest doubt, ultimately succeed in doing so; and when coal is exhausted and our water-power inadequate, it may be that this is the source from which we derive the energy necessary for the world’s work”.
These statements, however, are not recent. The first dates from 1894, from a speech by the French chemist, Marcelin Bertholet; the second from the inaugural address to the 1909 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by Sir Joseph Thomson, physicist and Nobel Prize winner. (Both were quoted by the German Social Democrat [August Bebel] in the last edition of his book Women and Socialism in 1912, part of which was translated into English in 1971 under the title Society of the Future).
What these statements show is that, at the beginning of this century, humanity possessed the knowledge of how to harness natural resources so as to have produced enough to adequately feed, clothe and shelter the entire world’s population. But it didn’t happen of course. Capitalism existed then just as much as it does today, and the aim of capitalism is not to satisfy people’s needs or raise their standard of living.
The driving force of capitalism is to make a profit for those who own and control the means of living so that they can further increase their wealth by accumulating it in the form of additional capital. This does lead to an increase in productive capacity and, in some parts of the world, has led to increased living standards. But nobody can claim—the UN statistics quoted at the beginning show this—that capitalism has been able to produce and distribute enough so that every man, woman and child on this planet is adequately fed, clothed and sheltered.
If the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources had been established at the turn of the century—and there was no reason why it couldn’t have been had a majority in Europe and America so wanted—then the production of food and basic amenities would soon have been increased and no one would have died this century from starvation or poverty-related disease.
Instead, capitalism continued, and not only did millions die of starvation and preventable disease but millions more died in two world wars and a non-stop stream of smaller localised wars, fought out between capitalist states over trade routes, markets, investment outlets and sources of raw materials. Millions more died as victims of colonial oppression or in concentration and slave labour camps run by dictatorial regimes such as those of Stalin and Hitler.
All this was unnecessary. It could have been avoided. But it wasn’t. The big question now is: will humanity waste the 21st century in the same way that the 20th century was?
Adam Buick
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