So! You thought all along that food Is produced because mankind must eat That this is the one really important reason for existence of farms, food processing plants and supermarkets. Oh certainly you have heard it said, chiefly by those who disparage the profit motive, that food — like all goods and services in capitalist society — is produced mainly for sale and at a profit. But somehow this didn’t seem to be such an earth-shaking bit of information. You probably tucked the thought away, and went about the business of stretching your food dollars in the markets.
But suddenly you find your dollars shrinking almost from day to day. You stand at the meat counters and gaze, emotionally, at the price tags. You have a family of growing boys and girls who can put away quantities of that food, and you wonder how you can possibly put meat on the table more than once a week, and maybe not that frequently. Or maybe you are a pensioner on a modest fixed income, and you are painfully aware that your check is not designed to include very much of what you might have been used to eating in your more affluent days.
What is it all about’ Why can’t cattle, hogs and fowl be raised in sufficient quantity, as they once were, to make prices more reasonable? And you remind yourself of what you have read in the papers and heard on the newscasts. The growers and processors are either holding back, going out of business or threatening to do so. Why? Because feed grains, it seems, have become so expensive that those producers cannot continue to operate normally under present price freeze conditions. No profit, no food production, they tell us, and so they smother their baby chicks instead of raising them for the table, because it would cost them more to raise them than they could get in their market, and one cannot run a business on losses.
So! It is true then what socialists have been saying all along. The prime reason for producing food — or anything else under capitalism — is not to satisfy the needs of mankind but to sell at a profit. True enough, it is explained today, that there have been serious crop failures due to drought conditions not only in America but throughout much of the world. And there have been those big grain sales to Soviet Russia and Red China that have added to the shortages here. And these are behind those ridiculous prices in the supermarkets.
But then another nagging thought hits you. How about those times, and there were many of them over the years, when there were none of those problems, and when all sorts of grains and vegetables and fruit were grown for the market, and when great quantities of these vital necessities were dumped in the oceans, plowed under, or burned? There was such an abundance that the growers and processors could not get a price that made it profitable for them to sell the food. Oranges, mountains of them, in California in the Thirties, were burned. Potatoes In Idaho, thousands of bushels of them were dumped, even in recent times. Coffee in South America and fish in New England destroyed. Why? Because of Government price freeze policy? Of course not. There was no need for Government intervention then. The problem was glutted markets.
So the difficulties in the supermarkets today are not caused by drought conditions, previous crop failures, big business deals with the so-called Communist nations. It is not that it is impossible to produce enough feed grains or vegetables or fruit or meat. The problem is that the owning grower-capitalists must make a profit, and economic conditions are such that they are being squeezed by rival capitalists. Would it not make sense, then, to get to the source of the trouble, the capitalist mode of production, abolish it, and introduce a socialist society in which the things mankind needs to survive are produced only because mankind needs them? We think it does.
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