Voice From The Back: The Futility Of Reformism (2009)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Futility Of Reformism

“One result of Ethiopia’s dreadful famine in 1984, when at least 1m starved to death, was the invention of celebrity activism on behalf of the world’s most miserable. Band Aid, then Live Aid, then even more sophisticated networking and the airing of starving children on television helped persuade rich countries’ governments to double aid to Africa as part of a wider set of promises to meet the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals laid out in 2000, the first of which is to ‘eradicate extreme poverty and hunger’ by 2018. Despite progress in setting up early-warning systems, better procurement methods and the rapid delivery of nutrition in the form of foil packets of plumpy nuts, the Horn of Africa has remained a hunger zone. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says the present drought is the worst there since 1984. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is usually slow to press the panic button, says it may be the tragedy of the decade. At least 17.5m people, the agencies reckon, may face starvation.” (Economist, 30 October) This is typical of the futility of a policy of reformism, many well-intentioned people spend an enormous amount of energy and time in trying to patch up capitalism only to find that instead of a million starving to death they now have over 17 million threatened with the same fate. The only way to solve this awful problem is to abolish the system that produces it and bring about world socialism.

The Cost Of War (1)

Many workers in the USA believe that with the election of a new president all their troubles are over, but the realities of capitalism will soon shatter that illusion. The US must compete in the world-wide struggle for markets and raw materials and to do so they need an immense military budget. How immense was recently revealed. “As President-elect Obama plans for his first budget early next year, the Pentagon is asking for a record amount, according to a senior Pentagon official. The official said the Pentagon’s baseline request being sent to the White House will be $524 billion for fiscal 2010, $9 billion more than last year’s $515 billion baseline request.” (CNN.com, 19 November)

The Cost Of War (2)

When governments count the cost of war they use dollars and pounds and figure what strategic gains or losses have been made, but workers have a much more brutal and realistic way of accounting. Here it is. “As of Monday, Nov. 17, 2008, at least 4,200 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes eight military civilians killed in action. At least 3,392 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers. The AP count is the same as the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Monday at 10 a.m. EDT. The British military has reported 176 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia and Georgia, three each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, one death each.” (Associated Press, 17 November)

Dole Queue Dictionary

Everyday you can read about the mounting figures of unemployment. This used to be called “getting the sack”, “getting the bullet” or in Scotland getting “your jotters”, but we live in more sophisticated times so they sugarcoat it with terms like “being surplus to requirements” or some such business-speak. We think that Nokia must take the prize though. “Is your firm experiencing a ‘synergy-related headcount restructuring‘? This, probably the most ghastly euphemism yet encountered for mass sacking, has been invented by Nokia. Indeed, so proud of it are they that they repeat it, or different versions of it, nine times in a comparatively short announcement.” (Times, 22 November) As a worker I have been sacked, screwed and sent down the road but “headcount restructuring” sounds even more painful.

A Dog’s Life

Two recent news items illustrate how distorted human values have become inside capitalism. “A wealthy female surgeon has commissioned a £1.4 million kennel for her two Great Danes, next to her second home on the exclusive Lower Mill Estate, near Cirencester. The kennel has a Jacuzzi, a plasma screen TV, thermostatically controlled beds, a £150,000 music system and a security gate with retinal scanner.” (Times, 26 November) “Fears are being raised there could be a jump in the winter death toll. An Age Concern poll of 2,300 people found many over 60s were worried about being able to heat their homes because of soaring energy prices. And with a one of the coldest winters for some years predicted, the charity said the death toll could rise. It comes after figures for England and Wales suggested there was a 7% jump in extra deaths last year despite a relatively mild winter.” (BBC News, 27 November) A pampered life for dogs but no thermostatically controlled beds for shivering old workers, that is how capitalism operates.

Material World: Famine in the Horn of Africa… Again (2011)

The Material World Column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although the current drought conditions are affecting a wide area in the Horn of Africa including Kenya and Ethiopia, the main media focus has once again fallen on Somalia, a country with a complicated and turbulent colonial history. The story is always the same: following a devastating drought there is a famine; the problem is not lack of food but lack of the ability to pay for food or lack of access to land to grow it. The world is stockpiled with food but giving it away would negatively affect the market.

This time around we hear that 3.5 million Somalis and 12 million Ethiopians within the drought region are under threat of starvation. Droughts are not new to the region, they are a regularly occurring phenomenon, but with the UN Famine Early Warning System in place for a number of years now, expectations would surely have increased for improved handling of the situation. Warnings did go out early this year predicting starving millions in the south of Ethiopia but the regime continued with its policy of selling and leasing great swathes of land to other countries to grow crops for foreign consumption. Last year 10,000 tons of rice were exported to Saudi Arabia alone.

Thomas Mountain, a US journalist who has lived in Eritrea since 2006, comments that while southern Ethiopians are suffering the worst drought and famine for 60 years those in the north are hungry because of ‘near record high food prices.’ This he contrasts with what is happening in neighbouring Eritrea, which is a result of totally different governmental policies. Here, within a handful of years, a move from rain-fed crops to a micro dam-fed irrigation system has led to better, more secure crops and dramatically falling prices of staple grains. According to the World Bank, life-expectancy improvements are ‘dramatic’ and Eritrea is one of the countries which will meet the Millennium Development Goals especially in the areas of children’s health, malaria mortality prevention and AIDS reduction. (http://www.countercurrents.org/mountain050811.htm)

News coverage of unfolding events in the area is patchy and can be biased according to allegiances or contracts of employment. Reports of facts on the ground are often distorted, depending on who’s pulling the strings. Currently Eritrea is a ‘state sponsor of terror’ according to Hillary Clinton who claims it supplies weapons to Al-Shabaab in Somalia. As a result, the media can say nothing positive about it.

Without doubt, the ongoing civil war in Somalia is exacerbating the crisis affecting so many of its people. The most problematic areas of Somalia for needy recipients of food aid are controlled by Al-Shabaab, a ‘rebel organisation with links to Al Qaeda’, which is unwilling to allow a number of food-aid agencies access for fear they are infiltrated by the CIA. The CIA is working closely with the official Somalian central government in Mogadishu, a government widely recognised to be in control of only a portion of the country. 

The whole of this region has suffered long and hard throughout its colonial history and is continuing to suffer as colonial powers attempt to subjugate regimes or leaders of regimes in pursuit of profit through the exploitation of natural resources and land accumulation. As explained succinctly in the article ‘Africa, starvation and speculation’ in last month’s Socialist Standard, the small elites in control of natural resources are only too happy to profit personally while exposing millions to penury and starvation by driving them from their land through international land deals. Different regions of the Horn of Africa are affected in different ways by the diverse conditions on the ground – but whichever way the story is spun, the competition for profit and accumulation underlies the neglect of the population’s needs.

Droughts are a well-known fact of life in a number of regions of the world and will continue to affect this region of Africa. Forecasts predict they will become more severe as problems with climate change increase. But it is not inevitable that there should be famine after drought. Famine results from the denial of land, placing restrictions of the free movement of populations, treating food as commodities and the growing commercialisation of agriculture, especially for export. All this is compounded by bad planning, inadequate water storage and management, poor infrastructure and logistical organisation. Socialism could not prevent natural events such as lack of rainfall (but it could prevent droughts by an adequate infrastructure) but in those circumstances, no one would starve as food would simply be released from warehouses or transported from other parts of the world.

Janet Surman

Material World: The Tigray Tragedy (2021)

The Material World column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ethiopia has 110 million people. If the tensions in Ethiopia would result in a widespread civil conflict that goes beyond Tigray, Syria will look like child’s play by comparison’ – Jeffrey Feltman, US special envoy for the Horn of Africa.

Seldom featuring as headlines in the media, since November 2020 there has been a civil war in Tigray, a mountainous region in north Ethiopia of more than 5 million people, a conflict that has killed thousands of people and displaced millions from their homes. The civil war is said to have spread in recent weeks to the Amhara and Afar regions and displaced hundreds of thousands of more people. Some observers hold memories of the Darfur genocide in Sudan.

Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, embarked on a military campaign against the region’s secessionist ruling party, the Tigray Liberation Peoples Front (TPLF), after accusing them of attacking a federal military base.

Ahmed was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliation policies with Eritrea yet when the elected Tigray leaders requested peace negotiations, he refused talks. Instead he invited Eritrean troops to enter Ethiopia to do battle with the breakaway TPLF and the Eritrean soldiers proceeded to commit widespread atrocities. They also took the opportunity to attack camps hosting Eritrean refugees who had fled the repression and persecution in their native country.

The federal government has declared ‘It is now time for all able-bodied Ethiopians to join the defence forces, special forces and militias and show their patriotism.’

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said ‘a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding before our eyes’, with up to 900,000 people facing famine conditions in what has been called the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade. Tens of thousands of children are on the brink of death.

Ramesh Rajasingham, the UN’s acting humanitarian aid chief told the Security Council that over five million people require humanitarian help.

Attempts to deliver much-needed aid has been hindered by Ethiopia’s government blockades, according to Grant Leaity, the UN’s acting humanitarian coordinator for Ethiopia, sounding the alarm over a critical malnutrition situation unfolding in the embattled Tigray region. Humanitarian access in Tigray remains unpredictable with obstructive military checkpoints thwarting the efforts to deliver life-saving supplies. What assistance is arriving is reportedly being looted by the TPLF insurgents.

Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent told the media that ‘The situation there is one of the most difficult I’ve ever seen. The people there are missing almost everything.’ Rocca said only four hospitals out of 40 are operational in the region and are all facing major shortages in medical supplies. He decried the unacceptable looting that has ravaged most of the health facilities in the region.

UN aid chief Mark Lowcock said, ’There is no doubt that sexual violence is being used in this conflict as a weapon of war.’ Dr Fasika Amdeselassie, the top public health official for the government-appointed interim administration in Tigray, told Reuters, ’Women are being kept in sexual slavery.’

War comes at an enormous human cost. Once again, we are witnessing death and destruction inflicted upon civilians based upon ethnic differences with the divisions spurred on by politicians’ power-plays and propaganda ploys. As always in war, all sides accuse the other of lying and carrying out atrocities. And the likelihood is that all are equally guilty and none of the participants is innocent. Peace for people in Tigray will be elusive.

ALJO

Material World: Meanwhile in East Africa . . . (2020)

The Material World Column from the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the world’s attention centres upon the COVID-19 pandemic it is easy to forget that there are many other destructive threats happening to people. There has been another plague taking place. Swarms of locusts have ravaged the Horn of Africa, East Africa and parts of Pakistan and India. Since December, billions of desert locusts have swarmed, devouring fields filled with crops such as maize, millet and sorghum, and stripped bare grazing land, devastating pasture and threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions people who depend on farming and livestock for their survival. It is a race against time as each new generation of the insects reach adulthood and take flight to widen their spread. The United Nations has described the situation as ‘a scourge of biblical proportions’. A square kilometre of the swarm contains 40-80 million locusts and can eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people. An average swarm destroys crops that could feed 2,500 people for a year, the FAO said.

One such swarm sighted in northern Kenya was reportedly 2,400 square km and contained up to 200 billion locusts which descend to feed off plants and vegetation, according to the FAO. A locust consumes their own weight in food every day. The swarms can travel up to 150 km in a day. If left unchecked, their current numbers could grow 500 times by June. Stephen Byantwale, the commissioner for crop protection at Uganda’s ministry of agriculture, said of the fast-breeding insects, ‘They are spreading like wildfire…’

The infestation poses an unprecedented risk to food supplies in an already vulnerable region with high poverty levels, plunging it deeper into crisis. Locusts are eating their way through Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.

In Ethiopia, the locusts have devastated more than 30,000 hectares of crops. Locusts have destroyed over 70,000 hectares of farmland in Somalia. Likewise, Kenya has more than 70,000 hectares of crops under infestation.

The locust plague was the result of recent extreme weather conditions that saw many farmers slowly recovering from three years of drought, which ended in one of the wettest rainy seasons in four decades in parts of East Africa, where floods killed hundreds. Climate scientists suggest that global warming has created the ideal conditions for the insects. The locusts arrived from the Arabian peninsula after cyclones dumped vast amounts of rain in the deserts of Oman — creating perfect breeding conditions.

‘The West Indian Ocean, including the Arabian Sea, was warmer than usual during the last two seasons,’ said the senior scientist of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Dr Roxy Mathew Koll, ‘This is largely due to a phenomenon called Indian Ocean Dipole [blamed, too, for Australia’s forest fires], and also due to the rising ocean temperatures associated with global warming.’

Warmer seas led to more cyclones in the Indian Ocean. It was Cyclone Mekunu, which struck in 2018, and then a second cyclone which came to the area that allowed the conditions to continue to be favourable and another generation of breeding, so instead of increasing 400-fold, they increased 8,000-fold which allowed several generations of desert locusts the moist sand and vegetation to thrive in the desert between Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman known as the Empty Quarter.

Keith Cressman, locust-forecasting expert for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), explained, ‘We know that cyclones are the originators of swarms – and in the past 10 years there’s been an increase in the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean. Normally there’s none, or maybe one . . . if this trend of increased frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean continues, then certainly that’s going to translate to an increase in locust swarms in the Horn of Africa.’

One piece of perhaps good news is that the (dining) table might be turned on the locusts. The EU is expected to endorse locusts as being safe for human consumption. Christophe Derrien, the secretary general of the industry organisation International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed says, ‘We believe that insects for food is one solution for some of the biggest challenges we are facing on the planet. In the context of scarce resources, and insect production is not too demanding, you have the capacity to produce high-quality protein. That is a very promising solution’ (Guardian, 2 April).

ALJO

Round the horn (1986)

Book Review from the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Preston King. An African Winter (Penguin, 1986) 

The area occupied by Sudan and Ethiopia became a focus of world attention as a result of the recent drought and famine. This study attempts to analyse the problems suffered by these countries and by Africa as a whole as it competes in the world of international capitalism. The various states suffer from many problems, not least in relation to their former colonial rulers. Added to this is a climate of devastating heat and uncertain rain with the threat of pest devastation. If that were not sufficient, these problems are further exacerbated by eruptions of conflict between and within the African states.

Ironically, if we examine infant mortality rates they compare with those in Europe and America at the turn of the century, as King points out:

the major infant killers in New York. Birmingham and Paris eighty-five years ago were those which now scissor their way through Addis Ababa. Nairobi. N'Djamena and the so-called Homelands of South Africa, (p.35)

These include diarrhoea, pneumonia, bronchitis and infections such as tuberculosis. The famine in Ethiopia that received international attention after October 1984 caused a massive influx of aid. Yet that attenuation of human misery did not relieve the underlying causes of the misery. There are also political considerations affecting how and why aid is granted. The establishment of the regime of Colonel Mengistu in 1974 after the overthrow of Haile Selassie, led to shift in support from American and the EEC to Soviet sources. Ethiopia has also suffered from an internal conflict with Eritrea which it absorbed in 1962 after federation with Ethiopia had been established by UN charter in 1952. After 1975 there was a revolt in Tigray province on the southern border of Eritrea. Ethiopia suffered from military incursions by the Somalis especially into Ogaden. It is these conflicts that have absorbed the energies of Mengistu's government. During the period 1977- 79 it is estimated that debts of some US $2 billion were owed to Russia for armaments — debts which it could not possibly meet. King argues that "Ethiopians are dying in the north because combatants on both sides place a higher value upon future political structures than upon immediate human suffering" (p.64). It is not simply the internal war over who will achieve political supremacy that is the problem but also a conflict within the Horn of Africa between the rivalry of America and Russia "to demonstrate which of the superpowers is blessed with the more powerful musculature" (p.64). In the nineteenth century the same conflict had occurred between France and Britain.

The Horn juts into a region containing the world's major oil reserves. Sudan and Ethiopia may have extensive reserves themselves. The Horn also represents a major strategic area for both America and Russia as well as being adjacent to the important transport routes of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. It is little wonder that when drought and famine occur, there is a limited capacity for response. The absurdity of this situation is pinpointed by King when discussing the Somali-Ethiopia conflict:

the 1977-8 war could not have been fought had the modem weaponry not been so indulgently supplied. The Americans (after the Second World War) first armed the Ethiopians; then the Soviets (after 1963) armed the Somalis; then the Somalis (1964 and 1977) attacked the Ethiopians; during which the Soviets re-armed the Ethiopians; after which the Americans and their allies re-armed the Somalis, (p. 116)

Even where a country has been funded for development purposes the problems of international finance can have disastrous consequences. By 1985 Sudan's debt was $11 billion representing $500 per head of population in a country whose GNP per capita was less than $400. The IMF's typical response was to suggest austerity measures.

It is no coincidence that Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia have doubled as theatres of war and famine. In 1985 the government of Siad Barre spent 65 per cent of its budget on military expenditure. The Somali government has pursued a policy of absorbing neighbouring territories inhabited by people whom it sees as having a Somali identity, regardless of the national barriers arbitrarily imposed by the former colonial powers. Somalia has courted aid from various sources as was seen above. For Russia it is reported that in return for military aid they were granted unrestricted access to Somali airfields which would allow reconnaissance over the Indian Ocean. Since 1980 the United States have been offered the use of Soviet built air and naval bases at Barbera for their Rapid Deployment Force.

The double standard involved in the conflicts within the Horn over autonomy and independence fail to recognise the dependency on foreign aid and on the very fact of having to exist in modern capitalism. The fuelling of nationalistic claims is contrary to the international nature of capital. Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia waste precious energies upon causes which have little benefit for the inhabitants of those countries. Rather they exacerbate the inability to cope with natural disasters that periodically occur. For the superpowers it is a battle to achieve spheres of influence again with scant regard for the needs of the indigenous populations.

The world is economically interdependent and for King this emphasises the waywardness of pursuing nationalistic imperatives. He seems to have a view of a one-world capitalist system which could be of benefit to the emerging African states through such multi-national organisations as the UN. He wishes to see a system whereby the poorer states can exercise more control over their lives and this would involve equalising power between rich and poor states:

there are various measures which can be pursued — liberalizing trade, providing greater aid., stabilizing commodity prices, stabilizing arrangements with multi-nationals, increasing investment in Third World agricultural and industrial development — which in fact should prove mutually beneficial to Africa and the North. (p.211)

Yet this flies in the face of all the evidence he has previously presented of an essentially competitive world in which conflict is endemic. His warnings about nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse are real threats and point to the need for an alternative future, but his view is limited and this he admits when he accepts that "development — meaning the achievement of greater equality between nations — will most certainly not end all inequity, brutality, exploitation and the rest. But there is no alternative" (p.221). His programme is to offer alternative relative poverty. He admits that the difference between poor and rich in developing and developed nations is little different in that "the domestic gap between rich and poor within developing states is on average no more than 4 per cent greater than within developed states" (p.220) but argues that the relative standards of living would see an actual improvement for the "third world" nations.

What King fails to extrapolate from his evidence are the possibilities inherent within technology and world resources for a radical alternative future. This is not based on the pious hope of a transformed. caring capitalism, which even King admits is untenable. King wants democracy so that the needs of individuals can be met. but this notion is not consistent with capitalism. It is only when we begin with the desire to fulfil the needs of individuals that the transformation of society can begin and the inequalities and impoverishment imposed by capitalism be removed.

Philip Bentley