Compensation announced for farmers (1988)

From the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agriculture

Annual compensation payments of up to £200 a hectare will be offered to farmers who “set-aside" at least one-fifth of their arable land by taking it out of production for five years. Mr John MacGregor, Minister of Agriculture, announced in the Commons.

Mr MacGregor said that the new EEC scheme to reduce surplus agricultural production by set-aside of agricultural land was agreed in principle at the European Council in February, It was compulsory for member states to introduce the scheme for the I988-89 crop production year, but participation was voluntary for farmers.

Land set aside would have to be kept in good agricultural condition as fallow, put to woodland or used for non-agricultural purposes, it could not be grazed.

Land developed for residential, industrial, retail or similar purposes would not be eligible; but the scheme would not include other limitations on non-agricultural use, though planning controls would continue to apply.

Rates of payment would vary. For fallow land and woodland, the payment would be £200 a hectare a year, except in the Less Favoured Areas, where it would be £180 a year. There would be a reduction of £20 in either ease if the fallow area was rotated round the farm.

For non-agricultural use the set-aside payment would be reduced by £50 a hectare.

There were Conservative cheers when he said he had decided not to take up an option under the Community rules to permit land set aside from arable crops to be grazed by livestock, subject to limits on the numbers, because of the difficulties of ensuring proper controls and the adverse effects which such an option could have on existing livestock producers, especially in the upland areas.

Payments would be based on farmers' arable crop pattern in 1987-88 and the first payments would be made for the 1988-89 cropping year.

The Times (15 June 1988) giving details of payments for not growing food.

World hunger can be ended (1982)

From the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late last year, Ronald Reagan was reportedly telling delegates from the World Bank that they should believe in the “magic of the market”. The latest World Bank statistics, however, reveal that 1.3 billion people suffer from a serious lack of calories and 700 million are on the verge of starvation. Those millions are direct casualties of the “magic” of the market, which responds to human needs only if they are backed up by the flow of money. Capitalism is based on class monopoly of the means of life and the destruction of food alongside mass starvation is just one of its insane contradictions.

The problem is by no means limited to Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 1975, the US Bureau of Census reported that over twelve million Americans were malnourished or sick because they had too little to spend on food. In 1981, a Common Market Commission report stated that more than thirty million people in Europe fell below even the official government poverty lines. Living standards in the industrially advanced countries are falling steadily, with the vast majority living in relative degrees of poverty compared with the ten per cent who possess substantial wealth. And yet, we are now able to produce an abundance of wealth; scarcity is artificial rather than natural, contrary to the assumptions of economics textbooks.

The 1980 World Bank Report declared that the quantity presently produced could provide 3000 calories and 65 grams of protein per person per day if it was more widely distributed. But the amount of food produced is often only a fraction of what is technologically possible, because of the artificial restrictions imposed by the world market. Even the 1.4 billion tons of grain grown in 1981 could not all be sold and so was not all eaten. In September 1976, Scientific American estimated that current resources could feed twelve times the present population of the world. In 1966 the US President’s Science Advisory Committee reported that less than half of the world’s arable land was under cultivation, and Canadian officials have said they could increase food production by fifty per cent in five years if necessary.

Sometimes famines result from a lack of food in a particular area, such as Kampuchea in 1979-80, but more often the problem is that farmers whose crops fail have no money to buy food elsewhere. This was the case in Ethiopia in 1973-4 and in Bangladesh in 1974. Why then is it that apparently unnecessary hunger is so prevalent in “civilised” societies? How can we read of farmers being paid by governments not to produce food and still imagine that we live in a sane society? The answer is that these contradictions are part and parcel of the way production is organised across the world today. The creation of surplus-value by wage-workers, and the competitive accumulation of this value as capital by companies and states, lies at the root of present social problems. Food is not produced to satisfy people’s hunger but for the primary purpose of making a profit. Proof of this lies in the fact that as soon as profit declines, production is cut back or even terminated, regardless of how many people might be starving. In India, over twenty million tons of “surplus grain" is being guarded by soldiers, while thousands of people starve. In 1978, the EEC dumped about 200,000 tons of fruit and vegetables in the ocean in order to maintain price levels. The insane logic of the profit system was made clear in the Financial Times:

There are now perhaps 750 million people who live at the margin of survival . . . gifts of free food, which can undermine local markets, can disrupt the process (7 August 1979).

So there is a strict incompatibility between capitalism and the satisfaction of human needs. The fact that the governments of the world are spending one million dollars a minute on armaments against such a background of hunger and waste is enough to demonstrate this.

But although the needs of humanity as a whole are not being met, those of the propertied minority generally are. Their privilege and property are in inverse proportion to our poverty and deprivation. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisations’s most recent world land census confirmed that one in forty of those with 250 acres or more control nearly three quarters of the land. Seventeen per cent of South American landowners control ninety per cent of the land; in Brazil, after the “economic miracle" of the seventies, the richest fifth of the population have more than twenty-five times as much as the poorest fifth. In Africa, three-quarters of the people have access to less than four per cent of the land. In Russia, the state allows access to the land and other resources only on its own terms which, as in the West, are guided by profitability. In Britain, one per cent of the people own more wealth than the poorest eighty per cent together. The world’s food resources are monopolised by people like the shareholders of Nestles, with a higher turnover than the Swiss government’s budget. The idea of “rich" and “poor” countries is therefore a distortion — there are people with great wealth even within the nations commonly regarded as “poor".

Those who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth agree that the most “reasonable" pay for any worker is the bare minimum. Their concern is to accumulate capital in competition with their rivals, to undercut them out of the market or swallow them whole. In 1981, for example, Whitbread brewery announced pre-tax profit of £66 million and earnings per share of 23p. Each worker was said to have created on average over £12,000 value in the production process, far in excess of the average wage. It is in this way that the shareholders expand their wealth while employees have to keep working merely to survive.

Brandt — more of the same

In recent years, the capitalist class and their political representatives have shown an increasing concern with some of the more embarrassing obscenities of their system. Their minds, fully in tune with their bank accounts, have come up with a spectacular and profitable solution: more of the same. By investing capital in the less developed parts of the world, they hope to open up lucrative new markets, and reduce starvation into the bargain. The transition from peasant to wage-worker, which took place over hundreds of years in Britain, is now proceeding more rapidly in countries like India. Nearly fifty million landless labourers have been produced there over the last twenty-five years, by the sweeping growth of world capitalism. Poor farmers cannot cope with the competition from multi-national corporations and with fluctuating prices, so they sell up and seek employment as wage-labourers. The “enlightened” capitalist philosophy is summed up in Brandt’s North-South, a programme for survival: “It is true that the rich cannot prosper without progress by the poor (p33), and by Sir Reay Geddes in The Role of Business in the world economy:

The business community abhors poverty, disease, malnutrition and illiteracy, considering their elimination to be both a moral imperative and the main route to social progress. It would also be good for business, (IDS Bulletin. Vol. 12, No. 2. April 1981.)

Brandt proposed an emergency four-point programme comprising the transfer of resources, energy conservation, a food aid programme and measures of agrarian reform. He also outlined a long-term strategy of industrialisation, free trade, and reform of the world monetary system. This is seen by some Western bankers as a way for the West to compete with Russia in the domination of markets. Brandt's proposals were in part a response to the recession of the late seventies and the consequent weakening of the financial system set up by the Western powers at Bretton Woods in 1944. By the end of 1980, “developing" countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and India owed about 500 billion dollars to various banks and governments. The credits used to finance the boom of the early seventies were difficult to repay with the onset of recession. Brandt sought to reorganise the profitable recycling of “petrodollar” oil revenues to pass through the banking institutions and be reinvested in “backward” countries.

All of these policies are concerned with ways of running world capitalism, and are likely to perpetuate the most unfathomable misery. The horrors of industrialisation in nineteenth-century Britain did not happen because the investors were malicious rather than kindly. Far from relishing these horrors, they preferred to forget them by wandering through parks and art galleries. Their aim, like Brandt, was the rapid accumulation of capital by squeezing maximum profit out of wage workers. This is in line with the logic of the market system, where success is measured in financial terms rather than human satisfaction. Reckitt and Coleman, whose interests include Robinsons Barleywater, Gales Honey. OK Sauce. Dettol, Disprin and Reeves' artists' materials, explain in their house journal, Roundabout, the success of certain policies in Chile:

Unlike the UK. the ideas are working in Chile. It is, of course, only fair to say that in putting the philosophies into practice Chile did not have democratic processes getting in the way. . . . One of the reasons we are so enthusiastic about our business in Chile is that it is getting the chance, through the country’s government, to operate in a good and peaceful atmosphere.

For the aptly named Reckitt shareholders, then, the notorious oppression suffered in Chile is just one more price to pay for the development of lucrative markets in Latin America.

The Brandt Report and other proposals for expansion, investment and reform might have been innovative two hundred years ago. Today they are irrelevant to the struggle for a world-wide, democratic society. We have the ability to provide food in abundance. The only barrier is the system of capital accumulation and class rule which Willy Brandt is intent on preserving. Even amongst those whose proclaimed radicalism prevents them from accepting Brandt, there is a blind acceptance of the capitalist principles which generate poverty as the cornerstone of class division. In their pamphlet. Beyond Brandt, the Third World First group propose the old and failed policies of Keynesian expansion, “self-sufficiency". and import controls, and mention the Chinese dictatorship as a model for liberation. Most ridiculously of all, they conclude:

Most importantly, Third World countries are debating the possibility of a Southern financial system, including a Third World bank, which would provide an alternative to the private banks and multilateral institutions of the North.

Unless world production is reorganised for use instead of profit, people in the less developed countries will be thrown directly from the frying-pan into the fire.

The possibilities of production are well established. The US grain boom of the sixties led to 20 million hectares being taken out of production; in 1972-3, they were put back in and the wheat crop was increased by twelve per cent. In 1977, the US wheat acreage was again cut back, this time by twenty per cent. The grain trade between America and Russia has been used by both Carter and Reagan as a political lever, while Gromyko summed up the position of the Russian ruling class last year when he said: "The Soviet Union would like to have normal, businesslike relations with the United States" (Guardian. 23 September 1981). As Bertholt Brecht put it. "famines do not occur, they are organised by the grain trade", and this includes Russia and China as much as America.

How, then, can the problem be solved? A useful lesson can be learnt from Honduras, one of the most fertile lands in Central America, where half of the children suffer malnutrition and stunted physical and mental growth. Two companies own about a quarter of a million acres used to grow bananas for export. The native peasants who work the barren hillsides last year organised several “invasions” in an attempt to take over the fertile valleys, but were put down by the military. The dispossessed majority across the world must instead take democratic, political action to bring resources into common ownership. If the state machine is not taken over democratically and dismantled, it will be used against any attempt to gain forcible access to the wealth we produce. The problem of world hunger can be solved only when a majority are prepared to act on the understanding that the abolition of poverty will involve the abolition of all property.

Clifford Slapper

Fifty Years Progress: Capitalism's failure to produce (1955)

From the February 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

A delusion that dies hard is the belief that plenty of everything is actually produced in the world, only needing to be properly distributed. This idea was being put forward over a century ago. It was encouraged by the increases of output due to machine production; by the obvious contrast between rich and poor; and by the periodical trade depressions in which the inability to sell what had been produced seemed to indicate that production had been greater than peoples needs.

The appearances, however, were very misleading and many people were, and still are, misled.

The seemingly very great increase of output when a machine replaces a number of men, can, and usually does, look very different when account is taken of the number of men required for the manufacture, operation and maintenance, of the machine, showing itself in the enormous increase that has taken place in the number of workers in the engineering and allied trades. When account is taken of all the factors the overall increase of productivity is found to be very small An industry able to show a continuous increase, year after year, of say 2 per cent. or 3 per cent. in output per man would be doing well. In some industries productivity falls not rises.

The surpluses of goods during a crisis do not mean that more has been produced than mankind needs but only that there is more on sale than the buyers will take; what they will take being limited for the great majority by their lack of money,

Marx, who was not taken in by the delusion we are discussing, quite rightly pointed out that capitalism does not produce enough for human needs.

Some eighty years ago Marx wrote:—

“It is not a fact that too many necessities of life are produced in proportion to the existing population. The reverse is true. Not enough is produced to satisfy the wants of the great mass decently and humanly.”

(Capital, Vol. III, p. 302.)

That was true then and it is true now.

If we take British capitalism as an example we can sum up the developments of the 50 years since the formation of the S.P.G.B. in a few simple propositions. Writing about the year 1904, in his book “Riches and Poverty,” the late Chiozza Money showed in detail the outstanding features of British life. They were that production was at a miserably inadequate level in relation to the needs of the population; that much of the product was trashy; and that out of what was produced the rich minority drew an amount quite out of proportion to their numbers.

There are people who will acknowledge the truth of Chiozza Money’s indictment of the capitalism of 1904, but who imagine that there has been some vast change since then. Of course, if they commit the elementary error of dealing with monetary amounts without allowing for the fall in what money will buy, they can get all sorts of fanciful pictures. On that basis they can say that the national income and national production, and also wages, are some six or seven times greater than in 1904.

But if they come down to earth and look at real values they will find that the national income and national product have increased since 1904 only by something in the region of 70 per cent. or 80 per cent.

(Estimates of growth of national income are reproduced in “Economic Development in U.K. 1850-1950,” published by American Mutual Security Agency to U.K. See also Colin Clark’s estimates in Review of Economic Progress Queensland, July-August, 1951).

But this increase has first to be adjusted to the larger number of people it covers, the population of the United Kingdom having increased from 40 million to 50 million. This cuts down the increase of the national income to an increase per head of the population of about 40 per cent. since 1904.

This increase of production has taken place partly through a small continuing increase of output per worker, partly through the absorption of most of the unemployed, and, finally, through the fact that a larger proportion of the population are now normally out at work in offices and industry instead of being at home (notably more married women).

We are then left with an increase in the national income per head of the population of about 40 per cent. in the half century since 1904. But let it not be imagined that this means there is available 40 per cent, more articles of everyday consumption. By no means. The national income, national production, and the Index of Production published regularly by the Government, all include, not only such items as additional factories, school buildings. Government offices, etc., but also armaments; this last item being particularly worth looking at. In 1904, expenditure on the army and navy was about £66 million, equivalent to less than 4 per cent. of the total national income. In recent years it has exceeded 10 per cent. of the national income, amounting in 1953-4 to nearly £1,400 millions. This is peace-time expenditure. During the two world wars it has been four or five times as great and for the whole half century has averaged over 15 per cent. of the national income, totalling upwards of £40,000 million and leaving that much less in the form of articles of consumption. If, to this, we add the destruction resulting from the big and little wars of the half century, it is beyond doubt that the great bulk of the not very large increase of production and productivity per man that has taken place since 1904 has been swallowed up in British capitalism’s armaments and wars.

If, in the meantime, the workers’ average earnings have, through their struggles on the industrial field increased more than the increase of their cost of living, and their hours of work are less than in 1904, these changes, too, must have set against them the more intensified work that is expected in the shorter working day, together with the fact that for many millions of workers the shorter time spent in the factory has been offset by the longer time spent uncomfortably travelling to and from work, because houses have been built further away from places of employment.

And though real wages are for many groups of workers higher than in 1904, only the very superficial observer can be deceived into thinking that poverty has been abolished. With a present cost of living about 2⅓ times what it was in 1938 what kind of life is given by the adult average earnings (before deduction of tax and insurance) of 197/8 a week on which to bring up a family? or by the woman’s average of 105/3? The railwaymen are just celebrating the raising of their wages, but the new rate for 60,000 porters and others will be, in London, 134/-, rising to 136/- after one year and to 138/- after two years. Provincial rates are 3/ less. Is this the abolition of poverty?

The Chancellor of the Exchequer disclosed in answer to a question (Hansard 16/11/54) that in 1953, out of 23 million male and female workers, only one in five has more than about £9 a week after deducting tax and insurance; and that there are 8,600,000 whose net income is under 96/- a week. Millions of pensioners are worse off still. Apart from the present low level of unemployment British capitalism of 1955 is much like that of 1904 for the workers. It is very like it too in respect of housing, for in 1904 the Government and the reformist parties were telling each other that they really must do something to solve the housing problem. They still are. The recent record rate of building is probably within reach of catching up the additional needs created by the war. But now, says Mr. Duncan Sandys, Minister of Housing and Local Government, “ they must waste no time getting down to the job of slum clearance.” (Speech at Birmingham, Manchester Guardian, 12/1/55.)

“We think there may be about a million slum houses. If this figure proves correct, I suggest that we should aim at breaking the back of the problem in most areas within ten years.”

But still another housing problem is looming up, "the modernisation of older houses.”

“Over one-third of the houses all over the country were built in the nineteenth century or earlier, and in the interests of all concerned they should be brought up to date.”

For many workers it is only by living in cramped accommodation in these slums and old, sub-standard houses, at low rents, that money can be found for modest expenditure on entertainment, holidays, drink and tobacco.

Which brings us back to where we came in, for Chiozza Money 50 years ago was writing about overcrowding, back-to-back houses, ill-effects on health, etc., etc., and of the need to do something about the housing problem. We have all these housing evils with us still, .The more capitalism changes the more it remains the same.

Edgar Hardcastle

Blogger's Note:  

Despite it not being February, this article got a bump 'cos it's mentioned in the Editorial Committee's reply to this letter which appeared in the October 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Atoms and food (1955)

From the October 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the Atomic Energy Conference at Geneva, a lecture was delivered by Sir Ernest Rock Carling, Medical Research Council Advisor to the Home Office. In this lecture, he said, that “all atomic radiation had been found to be potentially injurious to living organisms, and that the vast majority of permanent genetic changes caused by such rays were harmful ” (Daily Telegraph, 15/8/55). He suggested, however, that “the diminished fertility and shortening of the life span may not be altogether to be deplored, because world population may outrun food supplies."

There was an immediate protest by the Swedish geneticist, Prof. A. Gustavsson, who pointed out that the radiation damage did not lead simply to a diminution of the birth-rate or simple sterility; children might still be conceived, but what kind of children would they be. “. . . they might die in miscarriage, or soon after birth, or develop serious abnormalities such as big-headed dwarfism, digestive derangements, diabetes type diseases, or mental deficiency.”

This is something to look forward to in the future. It is, to say the least, a most unappetising prospect.

The destructive power of one bomb, such as was exploded at Bikini, is such that it could make an area the size of Wales uninhabitable.

It was pointed out by Dr. Richard Doll at an earlier meeting in London in June, of the Medical Association for die Prevention of War, that of 11 pregnant mothers in Hiroshima, seven bore mentally defective children. At Nagasaki, of 98 pregnant mothers, 30 received major radiation effects. Of these 30, there were three abortions and four still-births, a loss of 23%. He is, be it noted, a research worker in the Statistical branch of the Medical Research Council in London. “Peace News,” 10/7/55).

There; is, of course, no evidence at all for the suggestion of Sir E. R. Carling, that the mutations or genetic changes would, in fact; produce men such as Aristotle, Leonardo, Newton, Pasteur or Einstein. The power of these radiation bombs is destructive and not constructive.

Here is a case of a man who knows his own subject but is ignorant of what is going on in other spheres of study. For example, an authority on land use. Dr. D. L. Dudley Stamp, in his book “Our Undeveloped World,” points out that large parts of Canada, the United States, Argentine and Australia, do not yield nearly as much per acre as they are capable of doing. He sees the best farming in North Western Europe, whose soil is being improved, not wasted by erosion. Leaving aside the “great problem lands of the tropics” and the vast irrigation projects, he concerns himself with food production in the temperate zones. If the best methods were applied here, he considers that, without any extension of the present cultivated area, the world could feed 3,000 million mouths. If one includes the farming lands at present unused or only partly used he estimates that the food could be produced for 10,000 million people, that is four times the present world population of 2,400 millions. (Review Daily Telegraph, 2/4/53).

Why is it, then, that half the population of the world is undernourished? The answer is pretty obvious. Most people live from hand to mouth and have not the means to buy what they need. We live in a Capitalist world, Where the cream of production goes to the class that owns, whilst the vast bulk of the population have to struggle as best they can; and above all. Capitalism is not concerned with producing as much as is required for human needs but only that smaller amount that can be sold profitably.

I. F.

Support from an unexpected source (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The argument for socialism receives support from many directions, whether it be our lived experience as wage-workers of just about getting by or evidence from many fields of academic research, such as anthropology, evolutionary biology and even human palaeontology, much of which has been discussed in previous issues of the Socialist Standard. Support comes too from unexpected sources and the article below discusses one of the weirdest of these sources.

You may well not have heard of Carl Menger, but he is recognised as the founder of the Austrian school of economics, which is home to the crankier supporters of free-market ideas. The one thing these people have in common is a seemingly visceral hatred of the idea that workers could take the world’s productive resources out of the hands of the minority and use them to create wealth that is freely available to all. They would certainly be taken aback, in the unlikely event that they ever read Menger, to find that he, doubtless unwittingly, gave support to socialist ideas in his 1871 book, Principles of Economics, a text that was lauded in a modern foreword by Friedrich Hayek, the monetarist darling of the Tories in the 1980s.

Hayek says that Principles is worthy of attention due to ‘the outstanding character of this work among Menger’s publications and, indeed, among all the books which have laid the foundations of modern economics’ (2007 edition, Mises Institute, p. 21). High praise, indeed, from a leading capitalist economist (even if his own ideas have been shown to be pretty useless in recent years).

As for the work itself, Menger constructs an entire system (which will later be called marginal utility) that describes how individuals act, as consumers in a market system, to ensure their own maximum well-being, in a situation in which goods are always in short supply.

This isn’t just our view – Hayek himself wrote (p.18) ‘all of Menger’s analysis is grounded on the idea of scarcity’.

For Menger, scarcity affects not only luxuries but ‘by far the greater number of goods […] even the coarsest pieces of clothing, the most ordinary living accommodations and furnishings, the most common foods, etc.’ (p.95). He refers to all such goods as ‘economic goods’

In passing, it is worth noting that this material scarcity, as it affects an entire society, creates a conflict of interests that can only be resolved ‘if the various portions of the whole amount at the disposal of society pass into the possession of some […] individuals, and if these individuals are protected by society in their possession to the exclusion of all other individuals in the economy’ (p.100). In other words, the state as protector of private property.

Menger was writing at a time when industrial production was destroying earlier forms of production by creating a world market and herding millions of workers into factories. It might seem unusual, then, that he chose to build his argument largely on isolated individuals, one of whom he imagines living on a rocky island faced with the problem of how best to use a limited amount of fresh water for his own needs and those of his animals (p.134). Another example is two American frontiersmen and their families living in a virgin forest, ‘far away’ from anyone else, who are obliged to trade with each other (p.183).

The details of Menger’s treatment of these examples are beyond the scope of this article, as is the fallacy of composition to which they lead him: ‘A social economy is made up of individual economies, and what has been said above is therefore just as valid for the trade of entire peoples as it is for single economizing individuals’ (p.187).

When goods are free

Rather, of interest here is his consideration of natural resources (water and virgin forests are much in his mind, and even light and air get a passing mention) when they are present in abundance, in other words when there is enough to meet everyone’s needs. How do people act in such a circumstance? Are they impelled to possess these resources, which he calls ‘non-economic goods’?

Definitely not, because when ‘all individuals are able to satisfy their respective needs completely […] there is no practical necessity for any individual to secure a part of the whole sufficient to meet his requirements’.

These non-economic goods are not ‘objects of the human desire for property. On the contrary, we can actually observe a picture of communism with respect to [such goods]; for men are communists whenever possible under existing natural conditions’.

And to reinforce his position, he continues: ‘In towns situated on rivers with more water than is [needed], everyone goes to the river to draw any desired quantity of water. In virgin forests, everyone fetches the quantity of timber he needs. This communism is as naturally founded upon a non-economic relationship as property is founded upon one that is economic’ (the three quotes above are on p.100).

So, according to Menger, there is no basis for one of the knee-jerk objections that many workers raise when they come into contact with the socialist case, namely that free access can never work because everyone would just take and take and take.

Menger has shown the irrationality of such behaviour. He could, of course, have had no idea in 1871 that workers, under the lash of capital, would be able to build a global production system that is capable of producing such a vast amount of wealth that everyone’s reasonable needs and wants can be more than satisfied.

But the very logic of his analysis, intended as a justification for capitalist production and capitalist property rights, turns against his and the free-market position as soon as the material conditions of production developed. Who knows, in a socialist future, Carl Menger may even be considered as one of capitalism’s gravediggers.

Budgie

The World's Starving Millions (1975)

From the October 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is estimated that the awesome number of 460 million of our fellow human beings are suffering from severe malnutrition. What is worse, this estimate is based on the peak level of per capita food supplies before the situation began to deteriorate so seriously in 1972; since then the number of severely malnourished people must have greatly increased. (Report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, 1974.)

So the horrifying story continues. In space men link up, with machinery costing more than those 460 millions could ever dream of, whilst on earth hunger and famine spread inexorably. In a world of space link-ups is there any scientific reason why there should be starvation? The answer is a resounding “No!” 

Dr. Magnus Pyke (Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science) in an address published in New Scientist (10th July 1975) points out that scientific ability has more than kept pace with population expansion. “For the world as a whole,” he says “the production of food has — the figures show — outstripped the increase in population numbers.” It is estimated that whilst the world’s population over the next ten years can be anticipated to grow at the rate of 2.1 per cent, per year, the world’s food production will increase by 2.7 per cent, per year. And according to Dr. Pyke there is enough food around to feed the human race: “. . . food is available to prevent hunger world wide.”

So what’s the problem? Dr. Pyke argues that it is not know-how that is the difficulty:

The thesis I am propounding is that while the knowledge and power over events which science can provide can make great things possible, there are certain human problems in the solution of which science is incompetent.

Unfortunately Dr. Pyke does not tell us what are those “human problems”. Instead he gives us an idea as concrete as hot ice-cream. He says the starvation problem is basically the result of

. . . fundamental incapacity to deal with the relations between man and man, with human miscalculation and misfortune, and with Acts of God such as the failure of the monsoon two years running . . .

He has hopelessly contradicted himself. Having talked about “human problems” the solving of which are necessary, he is now talking about miscalculation, misfortune, and (spare us!) “Acts of God.” About

as scientific as dry rain. He ends up calling for the extension of the equivalent of the British Welfare State throughout the world.

As a scientific analysis of the ability of man to produce food, Dr. Pyke’s address clearly shows man’s capacity to produce an abundance of food. As an explanation of hunger alongside surpluses of food he takes the listener nowhere.

Two things are clear. One, there is the ability to produce a surplus of food; two, millions of people are starving (not just in “underdeveloped" countries either).

The reason for this conundrum is the economic system that man now uses. Instead of food production aiming to feed the people of the world, it is directed at one thing only, profit and accumulation of wealth for the owners. Although the scientists like Dr. Pyke often appear not to see this, the politicians who are elected to run capitalism can, when they choose to. For instance, Mrs. Judith Hart MP, former Minister of Overseas (Under) Development said that British farmers wanted to help towards solving the problems of shortage of food. But on what terms:

Our agricultural industry does not mind very much what it produces, as long as it gets a fair return.

(The Times, 21st July 1975)

And there is the difficulty in a nutshell. Producers don’t care what they make or how they make it. So long as it sells at a profit, capitalism will make it. The starving millions can’t “buy” food because they can’t fulfil that essential condition. So the capitalists invest in other things which bring a “fair” (i.e. profitable) return. Such as armaments for the governments of the starving.

The solution to the appalling problem lies in our hands now. But it demands, not as Dr. Pyke in childish simplicity suggests “a world welfare state” (isn’t the British one bad enough?), but a world working class, consciously determined to establish Socialism.

Ronnie Warrington

“Too much” food again (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism we are faced with a seemingly insoluble contradiction. Poverty and hunger exist in the midst of potential plenty. Within the private property relationships of capitalism the existence of means for ending this problem can itself appear to be a problem.

Take for example three reports in just one edition of The Guardian, that of July 12. In it we are informed on page 3 that:

“The world’s population will double by the year 2004 at the present growth rate, yet food production has already declined on a per capita basis, the UN reported today . . . agricultural production in 1969, the latest year for which comprehensive figures were compiled by UN statisticians, was 2 per cent lower than the previous year.”

A serious problem by any standard when one considers that the majority of the world’s people are inadequately fed at present. But here comes the contradiction . . . Turning over to page 4 we see an article by John Cunningham entitled quaintly “Scientists look into eggs”. He tells us that:

“Scientists are going to work on an egg — actually thousands of eggs — to try to find new uses for a surplus which is worrying the Eggs Authority so much that it is prepared to spend £40,000 on research and development this year.

‘We are not simply looking for food uses’, Mr. Bernard Mallett, the authority’s chief executive, said yesterday. ‘Frankly, anything could hold the key. It could be an industrial use, the manufacture of plastics, decorating materials, cosmetics . . . who knows? We hope research will find some profitable outlet for eggs surplus to even the food products market.'”

However the troubles of the Egg Marketing Board are nothing compared with the problems reported on page 12, in the Business Section, to be afflicting the Common Market Commission in Brussels.

“The record grain now ripening in the fields of Europe is causing grave concern . . . The crop is currently estimated at 174 million tons — four million tons more than the highest previous total. 

If such a crop is harvested, it could revive the nightmare of big surpluses in Europe.”

And their solution? “The Commission”, said The Guardian, “can only pray for rain”.

These contradictions are an inevitable outcome of the commodity system. Under capitalism food, together with other things we need in order to live, is private property. Wealth takes the form of commodities, that is, it is produced not primarily that people might eat, but to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. If too much food is produced for the market system to deal with profitably then the owners and those who run capitalism are faced with a “problem”. But this is only a problem where the relationships of ownership exist.

In a Socialist society, where the means of life will be owned in common by the world community, food will be produced not for profit but to satisfy human need. With the removal of the artificial barrier of the profit-motive, producing sufficient food to feed all the people of the world would present very few problems. Yet today while men and women go hungry eggs are “fed to minks to improve the quality and sheen of the fur” and men in Brussels are hoping rain will destroy food : what a sad reflection on the values of a society where profit is the paramount motive for production.

Gwynn Thomas

Beyond the state (2026)

Book Review from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical abundance: how to win a green democratic future. By Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell. Pluto Press, 2025. ISBN 9780745351353

This is an interesting attempt to consider the transition to a society of common ownership in a concrete and practical fashion. The authors identify what they call the two invariant aspects of transition: ‘popular protagonism’ and ‘contested reproduction’, and these are necessary to overcoming the ‘metabolic control of capital’. That is, changes to formal ownership and state control are insufficient means for dealing with what they call the dialectic of ‘bullshit abundance’ (ie the abundance of pollution, authoritarianism, inequality, etc.) and artificial scarcity (the failure to meet real human needs) of commodity society.

As suggested by the title, this book is partly a rebuttal to the ‘Abundance’ deregulation theme that has emerged in the United States (as exemplified by the book of that name by Klein and Thompson, which we reviewed in our November 2025 issue). What they propose though, is something they call ‘Public Common Partnerships’. This is a riff on public private partnerships, or what they identify as the process of the state de-risking capital investment as a means of promoting economic growth. In their version, assets and enterprises that are otherwise unprofitable for capitalists can be taken over by tripartite bodies, made up of representatives of the workforce, representatives of the public authorities and a community trust. The last of these has a responsibility for distributing any surplus generated by the enterprise: either as a return to workers, further investment, or support for other such partnerships. As such, these bodies bring in those more broadly concerned with the reproduction of society, eg those engaged in child rearing or caring, rather than those directly employed. The surplus is in the hands of the community.

They argue that these bodies would enable ‘contested reproduction’ and ‘popular protagonism’ fulfilling community needs while also being an educational tool for increased popular participation in the economy. The authors are clear they do not consider this a magic bullet, but rather a practical tool for spreading de-commodified practice and an educational experience. They pose it, rather, as a political wager, that might move things in the right direction. As they note, they are not calling for the abandonment of other forms of struggle, but adding this into the mix.

They do, in one chapter, though, speculatively examine how a network of these PCPs could plan food production across an entire country. They look to leveraging ‘Council Farms’ which, despite decline, cover thousands of hectares in the UK. They look to movements in Brazil, Venezuela and Kerala as examples to follow.

The authors themselves work on such structures as practitioners, and they point to a number of examples of where such models have been implemented: including a take-over of an in-door market in Tottenham and a pharmaceuticals plant in France.

This does come close, though, to the islands of socialism suggestion that is frequently put to us: the idea that socialism can be created in bits, rather than as a hard change-over from capitalism, which can simply ‘outcompete’ capitalist methods.

The issue is that their examples come from taking on peripheral parts of the capitalist system, bits that it no longer finds productive, which means that these PCPs mostly survive precisely because they are not a threat to the metabolic control of capital. Should they ever become so, the state would be called in to intervene. As the authors note, by the 1970s, in the UK, around a third of housing was council housing: Margaret Thatcher disposed of that with the stroke of a pen, and there is no reason to suppose that a ‘self-expanding commons’ of PCPs could not meet the same fate.

While the authors might well in fact relish such a contest as an opportunity to expand the contestation of reproduction, it seems likely that the result would be the same as the outcome of the Thatcher era: state power would prevail.

Particularly, as the authors claim it doesn’t require political organisation to set up PCPs, but rather public agitation (although how political/governmental bodies come to be involved other than through sympathetic politicians getting involved seems to be a question). If political organisation becomes required, then why go the roundabout way of challenging capital through these bodies, rather than striking at the legal and political structures that sustain it?

This then brings us back to the problem of using PCPs as some sort of educational tool. The working class already manage capitalism from top to bottom, we just do not do so in our own interest. There is no reason to suppose that those, like the Tottenham traders, who engage in a PCP to save their local market or bottle plant, or whatever, will have a desire or interest in challenging the ‘metabolic control of capitalism’. As with any reform-minded movement, the majority of those attracted will be for the immediate goal itself, and they would balk at going further, or even be actively opposed.

This leads us to suggest that there may be a third invariant aspect of transition: consciousness. Unless there is a conscious desire to do away with capitalism, and at least some idea of what is supposed to replace it, there cannot be meaningful popular protagonism, much less contested reproduction.

This book raises important issues around the way in which transition to a non-commodity society can be achieved. The proposed PCPs are at worst harmless, and at best could form a part of the way that the working class can defend its own interests within capitalism (or, maybe, even organise society post-capitalism).

The authors are correct that a wider network of activity is required beyond the state, but for us that is the conscious mass movement for socialism that must include taking political control of the state as a minimum to stop it being used to prevent the spread of a self-managed and co-operative way of organising society from emerging.

Pik Smeet

Capitalism v. Socialism (1986)

From the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is not a practical way of organising society. It gets in the way between humans and our needs. The theory of capitalist economics is that the market is a means of satisfying demand as people buy what they want. In reality, the converse is true: the market stands as a barrier between the worker and his or her needs being satisfied.

The basis of capitalism is commodity production. Goods and services are produced primarily with a view to sale and profit. For example, the owner of land producing grain has the main objective of the sale of grain for profit. If a profit cannot be expected, the landowner is discouraged from allowing grain to be produced because if there is more of it in the market than can be sold profitably prices will fall and the sale will not make a profit.

That is why now. in what is called by capitalist economists a crisis of grain overproduction. landowners are either taking land out of cultivation or storing or destroying their grain. This is all very logical in terms of the capitalist system where profit comes first.

A naive person might observe that grain is being consciously destroyed while workers are starving in parts of the world for lack of grain and conclude that there is something perverse about talk of food over-production. How can food be surplus to requirements while millions of human beings — yes millions — are dying of starvation? The wise defender of capitalism will explain to the naive observer that requirements under capitalism are invisible unless they can be paid for: the starving worker who has no money has no hunger as far as the market is concerned. That is the logic of the present system, sometimes known as "the magic of the market".

Other examples of this social perversion which our leaders call economic rationality are abundant. In Britain there are tens of thousands of homeless families. Indeed, in London every night you can see plenty of men and women sleeping on the pavements within the vicinity of luxury hotels. Many thousands more live in squalid homes. It cannot be disputed that new and better housing is not needed. But far from building new homes for the homeless and the slum-dwellers. there is currently a virtual absence of house construction and half a million building workers are on the dole. Why? Because there is a crisis of "over-production" — no market requirement for new homes. Of course, luxury homes are being built for those with plenty of money, but for those without it the misery of homelessness or slum living is the only option.

It is not that we are unable to produce to satisfy human needs. On the contrary, society has never before been so technologically capable of doing so. In comparison with earlier centuries, when men and women were still engaged in the battle to conquer nature, we are now well able to feed, clothe and house the world population of over four billion. We live in an age of potential material abundance.

The problem is not of management or government. Some workers say that if only we got rid of Thatcher or Reagan or Gorbachev or Mitterrand (different enemies depending where they live) all would be well. But would things be any better if the American CPers got their Gorbachev and the Russian Westernisers got their Reagan and the British Labourites got their Mitterrand and the French Conservatives got their Thatcher? All that would happen is that the same unworkable system would be administered by different leaders with different slogans but with the same need to keep in line with the laws of the market. Under capitalism governments do not control the market — it dominates them. The history of sincere politicians doing nasty things is proof enough of that.

Take unemployment. It doubled under the last Labour government. They blamed if on the world market. The Tories proclaimed that "Labour Isn't Working" and promised to deal with the problem. Unemployment doubled again under the Tories. They blame the world market. Now the Labour Party, relying on the short memories of the working class. complain that the Tories have brought about unemployment and they will deal with the problem. The fact is that both sides were liars and both sides were telling the truth: they were liars in opposition when they claimed that they could solve unemployment and they were telling the truth when they were on the spot and they admitted that they were not in control. World capitalism causes unemployment because labour power, being a commodity to be bought and sold, is not needed as much during a period of depression (over-production for the market) as it is when the market is booming.

According to capitalist economics, money is necessary for the satisfaction of needs. Give people money and they will be happy. Most workers would agree with that. Most workers lack money to the extent that they can properly satisfy their needs. Socialists argue that it is only when nobody has any money that they will be happy. This odd statement needs to be explained. Where money exists there is property. Money is used so that those who do not own can buy from those who do. Under capitalism a minority of the population own and control the major resources of the earth. Even though it is the working class who produce the goods and services, we must buy them from the owning capitalist class. So you might work all day at Dagenham building Ford cars, but unless you can afford the money you will not drive one. In short, money allows those who produce everything to buy a little piece of it back from those who produce nothing. Socialists advocate a new system of society in which everyone owns the world in common. In such a social order there will be no owners to buy things from because everything which is produced will belong to all of us. Production will no longer be for profit, but for use. In a socialist society there will be nobody to buy anything from, so money will be useless — it will be abolished, just as the tram lines were when trams went out of existence.

Let us take the example of the homeless person. Under capitalism the homeless worker does not exist in the eyes of the market. only coming to life as a paying tenant. In a socialist society two questions will need to be asked. Firstly, who needs to be housed? Secondly, what is the best way to satisfy these needs? Obviously, production is a material process which calls for labour, resources and planning. Nobody need sit in an office with a calculator working out whether it is profitable to provide shelter for people. The world will belong to everyone and everyone will have an equal right to decent shelter. Socialism will not solve the housing problem by stuffing money into a cement mixer. Money creates nothing — except problems for the majority of people who have too little of it. In a moneyless society people will have free access to goods and services.

Adherents to capitalism's market dogma say that socialism is not practical. It is the common error of an unscientific mind to think that what has never been tried could not work. People used to say that about aeroplanes. In fact, a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of all social resources would be far more practical than the capitalist system. In a world where production is solely for use there will be no need to ignore human desires simply because there is no profit to be made out of them. Is it not practical to have a society which is solely concerned with achieving what is technically possible, rather than tying itself up with the artificial constraints of the market? When we enjoy free access to the goods and services of the earth no child will cry with hunger and no old person will freeze because food or heating cost more than they can afford. They will be freely available to all. Only when they are can we speak of ourselves as living in a free society.

Defenders of capitalism, worried by how reasonable and workable the case for socialism appears, tell us that there is some invisible but immutable characteristic called human nature which will stop socialism from being practical. According to them, human beings are too unco-operative and unintelligent to live in a socialist society. Socialists deny this, but if we are wrong then socialism will never come about, because inherently unco-operative people will forever put up with the ruthless competition of capitalism and naturally unintelligent workers will permanently endure the poverty which the system offers them. Our experience is that workers do not like the consequences of capitalism: they are less stupid than capitalism's defenders hope, but not yet wise enough to see how easy it would be to create a fundamentally different way of running society. Socialists do not believe for one minute that workers enjoy poverty and homelessness and hypothermia and long hospital waiting lists and mass starvation. Nor will workers ever be brainwashed to do so. In fact, our experience tells us that our fellow workers are capable of thinking reasonably. of acting wisely, of organising co-operatively. So far such behaviour has been donated to those who benefit from capitalism: it is the millionaires who live in privilege thanks to the workers' strength and knowledge. Once those weapons are used in the cause of real human co-operation, socialism will be more than a practical proposal — it will be seen as the only sane way to live.

Steve Coleman

What is 'post-scarcity'?

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A post-capitalist society has to be, by its very nature, a ‘post-scarcity’ society. It has to be a society technologically capable of adequately meeting the needs of its people. This capacity constitutes the material foundations upon which the kind of social outlook and values indispensable to the very existence of such a society can arise and truly flourish. Without it, without an ample supply of the goods and services we all need to enjoy a reasonably decent standard of living, a debilitating and scarcity-driven competitive scramble will inevitably set in, undermining our willingness to cooperate with each other and sapping our desire to work for the common good.

But what exactly does an ‘ample supply of goods and services’ mean in practical terms? Obviously, what is ‘ample’ is dependent on how much we are able to produce in the first place, but it is also crucially contingent on what we ourselves consider to be ‘ample’ – our cultural values. That is to say, it is culturally conditioned.

Consumerism

In a capitalist society, your status correlates positively with how much you conspicuously consume in the form of material wealth. This is what makes consumerism such an integral aspect of our way of life under capitalism.

The point about consumerism is that there is technically no upper limit to the quantities, or money values, of goods and services you could strive to consume. Hence the emphasis on it ‘always’ being a desirable goal that one should consume more – a suggestion that conveniently chimes with the commercial interests of businesses wanting to increase their sales. More is always better. That there is no limit on how much you should consume stems from the fact that status competition itself is essentially a zero-sum game. I can only boost my social status within a status hierarchy at your expense (and vice versa).

According to the argument, it is not just that your sense of well-being and happiness is said to grow in line with your rising level of material consumption; crucially, it is also because this rising level of material consumption works to enhance your status in the eyes of others. The corollary of this is that those lower down this status hierarchy must therefore feel, to that extent, a little less satisfied and less happy with life — at least according to consumerist ideology. The only way in which they might mitigate this relative sense of dissatisfaction or deprivation is by striving to consume more – not just more but relatively more than others around them are consuming.

Our capacity to consume more is, however, dependent on us improving our economic circumstances and increasing our purchasing power, in comparison with others. But, of course, this cannot logically happen for most people in a capitalist society since the very mechanism of capitalist incentivisation itself depends on the systemic entrenchment, and even deepening, of economic inequality. Capitalism needs us to feel dissatisfied with our lot in life, by comparison with others, so we can all the more enthusiastically buy into, and embrace, what it is (literally) attempting to sell us. And, of course, work harder to achieve it.

This is an example of contrived or artificial scarcity. It is contrived because what the system is attempting to implant in us are what Marcuse called ‘false needs’.

Produce more stuff?

What can we do about it? It cannot be emphasised too much that ‘scarcity’ in this sense will not diminish and disappear simply by augmenting or adding to our capacity to produce yet more stuff – that is, by further expanding the already formidable forces of production at our disposal.

The problem is not that we lack the technological wherewithal to make a post-scarcity and post-capitalist society feasible. The problem is, rather, that we allow a system of profit-oriented and market-based production to continue to exist and to fundamentally get in the way of fully realising the productive potential we already possess.

A post-capitalist society, while it is not a recipe for a kind of stoical belt tightening is, on the other hand, not an excuse for some sort of turbocharged consumerism. The grounds for rejecting the latter are as compelling as the grounds for rejecting the former

Instead, there is a middle way, if you like. According to this approach the technological potential to meet humanity´s basic requirements for food, shelter and so on, to a reasonable level, should be looked upon as providing us with the means and the opportunity to better accommodate, or attend to, those other (and often neglected) needs we all have as human beings quite apart from our physical or material needs.

Lifestyle changes?

One thing is for certain: just privately reflecting upon the subject of consumerism and consciously seeking to adjust your own consumer behaviour, however much this might be welcomed, is not going to be enough. Not nearly enough. ‘Consumerism’ as it has been defined here is fundamentally a social phenomenon.

This is the problem with much of the currently burgeoning literature on the theme of a post-growth – and even, post-capitalist – society, awash, as it often is, with informative and penetrating insights into the negative social and environmental consequences of ‘consumerism’. The focus is too much on the particular lifestyles of particular individuals.

With some notable exceptions, there seems to be little in the way of a well-grounded analysis linking this phenomenon we call consumerism with the underlying socioeconomic relations that define our existing capitalist social order. The general tenor of the approach is essentially moralistic in tone and, ultimately, the solutions offered seem to hinge more on reforming or tinkering around with the system than getting rid of it.

Of course, changing values is undeniably important if we are to fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. The point is simply that we cannot just rail against the ‘consumerist values’ of this society, as we see it, without understanding where they originate from, the material circumstances out of which they have arisen. Criticism has also to be coupled with a clear commitment to changing these circumstances.

Not just subjective

We need also to look at the supply side of the equation as well – not just the demand side. We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society where we can just go out and kill an antelope or gather roots whenever the hunger pangs prompt us to do so. We depend instead on a highly developed system of food production linking the farmer and the consumer through a complex chain of intermediate stages.

In other words, ‘artificial scarcity’ has an ‘objective’ dimension, aside from being rooted in an ideology. It would be absurd, for instance, to accuse a starving person or a homeless person of ‘consumerism’ because they wanted food or shelter. The scarcity they experience is real enough, but the point is that the reason for it occurring is both contrived – artificial – and inexcusable. Quite simply, people should not have to go without in this day and age. Yet they do.

One very obvious reason why this happens is the enormous diversion of human and material resources away from socially useful production into socially useless forms of economic activities. The purpose of such activities is not to meet human needs but to keep the capitalist system ticking over on its own terms.

Keeping the capitalist money system ticking over involves quite literally reducing the human and material resources available for meeting human needs. These are the very real opportunity costs of propping up a system of capitalist production, which cannot be denied or just brushed under the carpet. There are other, more direct and visible, ways in which human needs are blatantly disregarded and ignored as well. Thus, while we talk of starving and homeless people, we surely cannot be unaware of the grotesque spectacle of millions of empty homes languishing in the face of a growing problem of homelessness or food being destroyed in the face of hunger for no better reason than to push up prices or keep them high.

Such scarcity is ‘artificial’ in the sense that there is no logical reason whatsoever why it should exist other than the fact that it arises from the nature of the society we happen to live in. It will not cease to exist until this society ceases to exist and replaced by one in which meeting human needs is the sole concern.

Robin Cox

Harvest hunger (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

While millions starve, it is a fact that humankind possesses the technical potential to feed everyone. Yet this potential is not being realised because of the restrictions imposed upon production by the present world system of buying and selling. In this system, food (and indeed, anything else) is produced only on condition that a profit will be realised if there exists what the economists call ‘effective demand’ (human need backed up by ready cash).

This point was forcefully made in a BBC Radio 4 International Assignment broadcast of November 11 last. In what turned out to be an astonishingly frank expose of the absurdities and contradictions of the production for profit system, BBC correspondents from all over the world reported on the gathering of the world’s harvests. The presenter began by pointing out that last year’s bad summer may seem to have had a disastrous effect on food production, but that in fact modern techniques were such as to have all but eliminated the consequences of bad or unexpected weather conditions.

Hence, we learned, most parts of the world had had a bumper harvest, and even in South East Asia, where severe flooding had limited rice production, use was being made of the massive crop from the previous year, much of which had not been put on the market.

In America next, farmers had reaped record’ harvests yet faced the problem that with so much food about, prices were being forced down, and they were having to lobby the government to fix higher prices. In view of this, the government had warned them to keep production down for this year (1979). In the meantime, part of the American grain crop had been sold to the Russians, whose own production could easily cover domestic needs but who preferred to leave their own fields fallow and import food more cheaply.

Conversely, many producers the world round had actually grown food but couldn’t afford to put it on the market as the price was too low. They would therefore stock it, hoping for a better price later, let it rot in the fields, or destroy it.

The presenter’s conclusion on all this was that we had a “world bursting at the seams with food, but beset with problems of distribution”. The situation was described as “paradoxical” in so much as those who had got the food couldn’t sell it, and those who needed the food hadn’t got the money to buy it.

With India’s ‘Green Revolution’, the programme went on, vast progress had been made in agricultural activity over the past twelve years. There was now a permanent stock of 21 million tons of grain (more than the whole annual production of the UK), yet malnutrition was still rampant. In addition, vast acreages still remained unexploited through lack of fertilisers, insecticides and modern techniques generally.

The correspondents in Africa and South America had the same kind of tale to tell. “In Nigeria”, one reported, “it’s said that if you plant a broom handle it will grow.” But here too, he went on, production was severely limited, this time by the system of land tenure in operation.

After pointing out that in a century’s tune the world’s population should stabilise at twice the present level, with the need for three times the present output, the presenter concluded with a question put to an academic expert on the subject; “Can the world feed us all?” The academic’s reply was: “Yes, if exploitation is rational, and even at the present level of technology.”

The key words in this reply are, of course, “if exploitation is rational”, for in a world where the means to produce food, and indeed everything else, are the property of a small minority of human beings competing to sell their produce at a profit, exploitation of resources car. never be rational. It can only be carried on in the overall interest of this small owning minority. ‘Rational exploitation” can only come about when the means to produce food and other goods are the common property of the whole of humanity and are used co-operatively in a system of free access and democratic control.

In the meantime, the small minority will continue to have it their way. Their political control, either through state dictatorship as in Russia, China and Cuba, or through representative government as in Britain and the USA, safeguards their economic position while assuring continued waste and artificial shortage in all parts of the world.

It is up to the vast non-owning majority to take this political control for themselves and to use it to create a non-class divided society which will release the rich abundance of food and other goods which the earth has to offer.

Howard Moss

Where’s the money going to come from? (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who watches the political programmes at Sunday lunchtime will he familiar with the question "Where’s the money going to come from?" On 1 May, for instance, Brian Walden pressed Labour MP Ann Taylor on this question as a rejoinder to her suggestion of increased nursery provision. And Robin Cook, who insisted on the European Social Chapter (On The Record, 29 May), was similarly rebuked by the money question. Labour MPs of course have no real response they can hold against this shibboleth of received wisdom; they believe in the basic precepts which necessitate the asking of the question.

It seems obvious to socialists that an analysis of the nature of money is required here. It can't be simply assumed that money is a type of innocuous representation of actual wealth. On the contrary it must be asked if its overall arithmetical form imposes certain ideological categories and casts its own ethical (or unethical) shadow over our existence.

Nowadays the analysis of money has disappeared, in Orwellian fashion, from economic discourse. But critiques of money extend back over 2000 years. One of the best discussions of money, and one that greatly influenced Marx, is still that of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Aristotle

Aristotle attributed two natures to money, that of a means and that of an end. This distinction reflects an ethical critique of the effects of money and how it is used. Some uses of money were acceptable and even laudable, argued Aristotle, as when money is used simply as a convenient means of getting useful things. But other uses, he said, were unacceptable or perverted, as where the exchange of goods was simply a mask for the accumulation of money or spurious wealth. So trading directed towards the use of goods with money merely as a common medium of transaction was seen as good, and trading directed at the exchange of commodities for profit, with commodities used merely as a means of securing this profit, was seen as bad. The distinction corresponds closely, but problematically as we shall see, to the one between use value and exchange value.

Aristotle used the example of the Delphian knife to illustrate the perverting effect of money. The Delphian knife was a tool that was made to be exchanged for money rather than to be used to perform a task. It could be used as a knife, a file, and a hammer, but in none of these functions was it very adequate, its only advantage was that it was cheaper in money than the three separate tools together. Hence a compromise is made between the tool-like properties of the knife and its exchange properties, and insofar as it was made to serve the latter function, it is not really a tool, except, as it were, a tool for making money rather than things.

Even philosophy itself is compromised by its association with exchange value. According to Aristotle, the Sophists let themselves be tainted by the profit motive, for the Sophist "is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom". The medical profession too becomes confused when its ends are mixed between money-getting and health. Contemporary examples inevitably spring to mind: "health" businesses selling liposculpture, far from providing perfect information on the effects of the operation, as the market sophistry maintains, on the contrary deliberately deceive patients about the risks involved, in order to secure the sale. And it could be argued that in every consumer product, a compromise must be made when the purposes involved in its creation are divided between exchange and use value; between the requirements of the seller and those of the customer.

Aristotle’s distinctions of exchange and use, means and ends, ethics and purely economic factors apply to the modern orthodoxy. The relatively trivial question "Where’s the money going to come from?" becomes the penetrating question "What is money?" The latter question challenges the received categories of exchange relations and demands an investigation into the barbaric practices out of which exchange arose. It is a question that asks is money realistic — or atavistic?

It is clear that ideas as much as facts are central to the workings of money. For example, the principle that whatever projects are envisaged must come out of existing funds. Fiscal spending, so it is said, represents a real practical limit which it is impossible to surpass. Behind this is the idea of a finite cache of wealth, a fund or a larder, in which things have been stored, and out of which things can be withdrawn at a later date. Is this really a practical matter, as no doubt Brian Walden would believe, or is it the promulgation of an ideological programme?

Admittedly the roots of this "larderism" lie deep in the facts of prehistory, when the store of food for the winter exemplified the model of a limited physical source determined by the real quantity and the real fertility of the land. This model still provides a basic formula for the operation of banks and nations, the only difference being that food has been replaced by an abstract symbolism of money, taking the form of bank reserves or national currency reserves representing all forms of production, not just agricultural.

This larderism has a powerful hold on the level of folk economics. On this level, the constraints of fixed budgets emerge in populist style as slogans such as "you can't just print money", "there is no bottomless pit", "you can't have your cake and eat it", "you don’t get ought for nought", "money isn’t made in heaven it's earned here on Earth", "there's no such thing as a free lunch", etc. Ah, the stuff tabloids are made of. And on the academic level, the principle seems to be simply elevated by nobler terms of expression rather than critically evaluated. Lord Robbins urged us to accept economics as the eternal problem of matching infinite wants against finite resources; the fundamentals of Mercantilism insist that "no man profiteth but by another's loss". All these aphorisms, ranging from crudity to casuistry, suggest a store of goods gained by toil in the summer as protection from the oncoming winter.

Despite creditable origins, this economic picture is logically flawed by its attempt to project the properties of a primitive domestic situation upon the complexities of the modern macroeconomic world. Some systems do follow the model of a fixed fund of goods, but the patterns of complex interaction between humankind and the biological and physical world, are, or can be, either synergistic or mutually exclusive. In the case of synergy, the more you take out of them, the more you have left; in the case of exclusivity, activity in one area has no effect on activity in another. The universal form of money makes all activities mutually burdensome, and insists, for instance, that the growth in education must be paid for by cuts in health, or investment in transport must be paid for by defence. Thus a kind of universal parasitism is established. One must question the nature of a formula of mutual burden which happens to have the very useful effect, for the Establishment, of dividing factions of society as competitors for limited resources.

The concepts of synergy and mutually exclusivity seem to violate the plausible, but examples are easy to find. The human body is synergistic in that the more you expend its energy as in exercise, the more energy you have as in fitness. If the linear economic model was applied to the body, you would get fit by sitting still and eating, thereby accumulating capital as fat. Mutual independence is clearly a fact of the natural and human worlds; there is no logical or physical connection between distant objects and activities. A bee taking honey in Glasgow is not constrained by one doing the same in London, yet Strathclyde is constrained by public spending in the Home Counties. Why do we impede ourselves in this way? Well, the popular wisdom is that there is only one pot of honey (money), for which we vie for attention. We should learn something from the symbiotic ecology of insects.

Free lunch

An even more serious error of money symbolism concerns the frontier of possible growth. The pseudo-physical arithmetic limit on economic development seems to be rooted in the Physiocratic principle that all wealth comes from the Earth, or the similarly-arbitrary Mercantilist precept that all wealth comes from the trade, or for that matter from the Marxist view that value is added by labour. But not only are the Earth’s resources, in contradistinction to the money model, symbiotic; they are also supplemented, as is the human body, from an external source. The human body is an organism in the world and receives its energy through food, and the Earth is a planet in the solar system, that likewise receives, free of charge, an inexhaustible input of fuel from the star in the middle of the solar system: the sun.

The sun is the free lunch that orthodox economics can’t come to terms with. The money system operates on a closed world assumption, on the much-stated monetarist principle that money is made here on Earth, it doesn’t come down from the sky. In fact all the wealth-making processes on the Earth are driven by extraneous energy that does come down, as it happens, from the sky. If money fails to reflect this reality and its function becomes not to reflect actual resources but to impose an ideological limit on their development and distribution. And if those limits demand that the homeless cannot be housed and that the hungry cannot eat (because where’s the money going to come from?) then that ideology isn't innocuous but a necessarily ethical, and unethical, force.

So Aristotle’s point is proved: the effect of money does poison the transactions and distributions it enforces its rule over. But not just directly because of the profit motive or exchange, but indirectly because of the general nature of the abstract form of exchange which embodies false assumptions about the nature of the world: the assumption that the fiscal frontier is the final frontier.

But to make Aristotle’s analysis fully consistent we ought to abandon the means/ends distinction which had a confused relation to the use/exchange distinction, and say not that there are two types of money (use money and exchange money) but that money necessarily is exchange value, that exchange value is necessarily perverse, and that true usefulness is necessarily contrary to the abstract value which money imposes on the physical world.

If Aristotle had accepted this analysis it would have solved a number of problems for him. Instead of having a tension between the two natures of money, one related to use, and one related to exchange, he could have rejected exchange completely and have said that the evaluation of goods should be dependent solely on their quality as defined in use. In a socialist system it is indeed use value that is the criterion of true wealth, and the spurious abstraction which exchange relations arbitrarily, and harmfully, apply to useful things would be simply removed.

If the premise of inherent scarcity is abandoned, as it can be when the qualitative, generous and realistic physical frontier is substituted for the miserly quantitative economic frontier, then it is no longer necessary to measure all goods by one universal standard as a means of rationing them. Is money the measure of all these things or are humans? Let us say the latter and thus advocate, along with an Aristotle-made-consistent, the abolition of exchange and the abolition of money. And if money is abolished, the question, where is the money to come from, is obviously redundant.

Norman Armstrong